I am also a native Spanish speaker, and I think that some
precisions are required on what one understand by "diacritic"
I think that the examples that Rene provided about "termino" and "terminó"
(which can be extended to almost any regular verb to distinguish
present and past tenses: canto/cantó, miro/miró, hablo/habló, etc.)
can not be considered diacritics, since they indicate where the stress
is in the word, that is, "termino" is pronounced with the stress on
the "i", while "terminó" is stressed on the "o". There is a phonetic
difference that *must* be written to provide the reader with the
same information that a hearer would have.
On the other hand, the example on "sé" (I know) and "se" (reflexive mark)
is a real diacritic, because it provides a distinction between two words
that sound the same although mean different things.
My feeling is that if a hearer can disambiguate "sé" and "se" by context,
a reader should be able to do the same without diacritics. Although the diacritic
*does* provide information (I am no expert, but I dare say that it is some
kind of prosodic information, since sé-verb and se-reflexive have different
roles in the sentence, so the diacritic helps the reader in finding the right
prosody), it is a rather weak information (I mean, not imprescindible
to understand).
Obviously this is not true when the accent indicates a real phonetic difference as
in "termino/terminó".
best
Lluis
Bruce Lambert wrote:
> I'm a pretty strong believer in context as a disambiguator, and human
> beings are amazingly talented at correctly going beyond the information
> given. So my hunch is that a great deal of text without diacritics can
> still be unambiguously understood by the majority of readers. In fact, if
> Spanish or Czech (or whatever language that uses diacritics) email messages
> are often sent without diacritics, then I take this as an existence proof
> that, to some extent, they are not needed for satisfactory comprehension.
>
(...)
>
> At 11:50 AM 4/19/01 -0700, Rene.Valdes@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.
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Lluís Padró i Cirera UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE CATALUNYA
Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Tel: XX-34-934 015 652
Fax: XX-34-934 017 014 Mòdul C6 - Campus Nord
padro@lsi.upc.es Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3
http://www.lsi.upc.es/~padro08034 Barcelona
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