28.1735, Qs: Canonical Order in Spanish Punctuation

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1735. Sat Apr 08 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1735, Qs: Canonical Order in Spanish Punctuation

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Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2017 16:34:41
From: James L. Fidelholtz [fidelholtz at gmail.com]
Subject: Canonical Order in Spanish Punctuation

 
Subject: Re: 28.1658, Qs: Canonical Order in Spanish Punctuation

Hi, Albert & others interested in the topic,

Unfortunately, that thesis became defunct for various reasons and there's not
much to say on that score. Still, I'm sorry I have been hard to reach. This
email address is likely to stay current for the foreseeable future.

While I don't remember much about that particular aspect of that thesis, I
have done a little work on Spanish punctuation, and it is worthwhile pointing
out a few differences from that of English.

Firstly, Spanish permits (quite freely) the use of commas in some places where
English requires a period at the end of a sentence, producing what to English
sensibilities seems like a 'run-on' sentence, as long as the second clause
bears some pragmatic or semantic relation to the first. This is *one* of the
reasons why in translations of English to Spanish or vice versa the Spanish
version is nearly always longer (in words), apart from the grotiness or not of
the translation. Likewise, questions or exclamations consist of two paired
symbols: the first (¿ or !, respectively) of which occurs before the first
word of the questioned (resp. exclaimed) clause and the second (? or !) at the
end of the clause (the same, as is also true for English, goes for questioned
(resp. exclaimed) words or other cohesive elements). Similarly, the alphabet
is slightly different from that of English, although the Real Academia
Española has recently (about 25 years ago) taken measures to make the alphabet
more 'international', eliminating 'ch' and 'll' as separate letters (after,
respectively, 'c' and 'l'), though surely the computer and its peculiarities
had more to do with that decision than internationalism: note that, despite
the earlier decision to accept 'México' along with 'Méjico' for the
country/state/city, many Spaniards continue spelling the country with a 'j',
despite the fact that that spelling is virtually unknown here since the first
part of the last century. For proper nouns, the RAE has always accepted
'incorrect' double spellings, as in C/Zepeda (the rules would insist on 'C').
With respect to punctuation, Spanish has a wider variety of pairs of
punctuations to indicate non-integral material than English. (Along with ( )
and [ ] they also use { }.) The RAE has recently done away with the angle
quotes <<  >>, leaving just the various types of quote marks in use for
English. (Perhaps they were obsolescent anyway, as I've never seen a
typewriter or computer with those marks on the keyboard; likewise, I had never
seen a typewriter key 'ch' or 'll'.) I'd be remiss if I left out the 'extra'
accented vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú, ü; and the ñ, which continues, alphabetically
after the n). Occasionally, letters occur in borrowed words where they
'shouldn't', as in clu*b* (often pronounced [klu], though the plural is
usually [kluBes]). There are many more oddities in Spanish spelling, despite
which Spanish has the fame of being a 'phonetic' language, whose pronunciation
is derivable from the spelling (sort of true, although because of pairs or
more of letters pronounced the same [at least sometimes, depending on the
context], the opposite is not as true: b/v, s/z(in Mexico and the Americas
more generally)/x (in certain contexts)/c before i/e, j/g before i/e).
Likewise, there are some pronunciation peculiarities in México which I won't
go further into here.

Secondly, the 'rules' of punctuation are actually fairly free, as in English,
although there are many who nevertheless abuse them (e. g., putting a comma
between a long subject and its verb: the comma is ¡never! used to separate the
subject and the verb (note how useful Spanish punctuation can be!). The comma
occasionally occurs between the subject and the verb phrase, but it is then
part of the subject. Btw, the rules for capitalization are rather different
from English. E. g., México as a name for a number of areas in the country is
always capitalized, but nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. derived from it are not
capitalized: mexicano (n/adj), mexicanizar (v), etc. Generally, 'secondary'
categories are likewise not capitalized (days of the week, months, etc.).

Sorry if I haven't been of much help. I really don't know of any work just on
that topic, though you should try Googling, and be inventive as you do so (if
at first you don't succeed, ...).

Jim

James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
 

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax
                     Writing Systems

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Spanish (spa)



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