Re: Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness

From: Rene.Valdes@lhsl.com
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 20:50:19 MET DST

  • Next message: Steven Krauwer: "Re: Corpora: a particular type of sloppiness"

    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.

    René Valdés
    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 niño *se* cayó (The boy feel down)
       *Sé* que será difícil 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!
       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?
       Monica Merino



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 19 2001 - 20:50:14 MET DST