Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

[Steven Krauwer]

Rene.Valdes at lhsl.com wrote:
>
> In support of Monika's argument, I'll offer the following two sentences:
>
>      Ya termino.        (I'm finishing soon.)
>      Ya terminó.        (It's already finished.)
>
> Without the diacritic, you would not be able to tell which one of these two
> meanings to assign to this sentence.  I use diacritics whenever possible,
> even at the risk of having my text become garbage when it travels through
> cyberspace.
>
> Another interesting case is the very important distinction between año and
> ano, two nouns with quite different meanings.

You're the experts, so I won't even dream of challenging what
you  are saying, but I am really curious to hear the opinion of
colleagues from the Arabic speaking world, as they seem to be
able to live happily with unvocalized written texts.

Should I infer that Spanish is more ambiguous in this respect,
or that Arabic speakers (or rather: readers) are more tolerant,
or that Spanish diacritics and Arabic vowels are different
animals?

Steven