Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

[James L. Fidelholtz]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001 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 terminσ.        (It's already finished.)

[JLF replies]
	These would hardly be ambiguous w/o the diacritics in context.

>
>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 aρo and
>ano, two nouns with quite different meanings.
>
>Renι Valdιs
>San Diego, California
>USA
>
>Monika Merino wrote:
>   As a native speaker of Spanish I can tell you that ALL Spanish speakers
>   would
>   face terrible comprehension problems without diacritics. In many cases,
>   diacritics in Spanish are used to "distinguish" homonyms. Take for
>   example
>   these two cases:
>   El niρo *se* cayσ (The boy feel down)
>   *Sι* que serα difνcil entenderlo (I know it's going to be difficult to
>   understand)
>   In the first case we're talking about the the reflective form of the
>   verb "to
>   be" whereas in the second case we're talking about the first person
>   singular
>   conjugation of the verb "to know". Perhaps in isolated sentences like
>   these two
>   and in the the "relaxed" and rather artificial situation of "reading
>   examples",
>   these diacritics might not seem crucial for comprehension. But I can't
>   imagine
>   what it would be like to have a 5,000-word Spanish text with no
>   diacritics!

[JLF replies:]
	There's no way I can see that *either* of these sentences in
*any* context could be misread, one for the other, with or without the
diacritics.  Reading Spanish w/o diacritics is just a question of
getting used to it; the amount of information lost is truly
negligible.  Not *wanting* to, on the other hand, is a question of
taste, de lo que no disputandum est.

>   It would take ages for native speakers of a language with diacritics to
>   get
>   used to one without them! And anyway, what's the problem with
>   diacritics?

For Spanish at least, my mailbox gets lots of such messages, and I find
very little problem with reading them.  Of course, I usually don't
object to messages with them, either, unless they have been butchered,
making the message in many cases close to illegible, and in any case
much worse than the same msg w/o any diacritics.
	Jim

-- 
James L. Fidelholtz			e-mail: jfidel at siu.buap.mx
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje	tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades	fax: +(01-2) 229-5681
Benemιrita Universidad Autσnoma de Puebla, MΙXICO