Writing System Of Spanish

This article deals with the alphabet, punctuation and orthographic rules of the Spanish Language . For detailed information on the pronunciation not found here, see also Spanish Phonology .

ALPHABET

The (''á, é, í, ó, ú''), the vowel ''u'' with Diaeresis ('' ü ''), and the letter ''n'' with a Tilde ('' ñ ''). The letters ''k'' and ''w'' appear only in loanwords (such as ''kilogramo'', ''kiosco'', ''karate'', ''walkman'', ''whisky'').

The vowels with accents and diaeresis are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but ''ñ'' is a letter in its own right, and it appears in dictionaries after ''n''. Therefore, for example, in a Spanish dictionary ''piñata'' comes after ''ping-pong''.

Traditionally, the digraph ''rr'' was considered a separate letter, but this is no longer the case; the digraphs ''ch'' and ''ll'' have been considered separate letters since , the tenth congress of the Association Of Spanish Language Academies agreed to sort ''ch'' and ''ll'' as ordinary pairs of letters by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for other purposes. Thus for example ''ch'', instead of being sorted between ''c'' and ''d'' as formerly, now comes between ''ce'' and ''ci''.

Names of the letters

See International Phonetic Alphabet for the symbols used to represent pronunciation.
This table does not feature the traditional names of the letters ''ch'', ''ll'', and ''rr'', which are called ''che'' , ''elle'' , and ''erre'' . These names are habitually used in spelling. For example, ''chillón'' is spelt out as ''che, i, elle, o con acento, ene''. Many Spanish speakers spell ''ch'' as ''ce hache'', while ''ll'' is sometimes spelled out as ''doble ele''.

The fact that these are separate letters is not supposed to affect capitalisation. Therefore, the word ''chillón'' in a text written in all caps should be ''CHILLÓN'' and not ''ChILLÓN'', and if it is the first word of a sentence, it is written ''Chillón'', not ''CHillón''. This rule is respected with ''ch'', but with ''ll'' one does sometimes see Lift s with buttons marked ''LLamar''.

Alternative names

The letters ''b'' and ''v'' were originally simply known as ''be'' and ''ve'' and pronounced accordingly. However, now that Spanish no longer distinguishes between these sounds, it has become necessary to add something to the names to tell them apart. The table above gives the standard names used in Spain. You may encounter some of the alternative names. Mexicans often say ''be grande/ve chica''; Argentinians , ''be larga/ve corta''; Catalans , ''be alta/ve baja''; Puertorricans , ''be/uve''. Some people give examples of words spelt with the letter e. g. ''be de burro/ve de vaca''. Some people even call them ''be labial'' and ''be dental'', not realizing that if this were true, there would be no need for such names.

It is sometimes suggested that the name of the letter ''r'' is ''ere'' when it is single, and ''erre'' when it is double.

''I'' is occasionally known as ''i latina'' ("Latin ''i''") to distinguish it from ''y'', which is known as ''i griega'' ("Greek ''i''"). The latter is a late borrowing from the Greek letter ''υ'' ( Upsilon ). In turn, the letter ''y'' is occasionally known as ''ye''.

''W'' can be ''doble ve'', ''ve doble'', or ''doble u'', or even ''uvedoble''.

''Z'' is usually called ''ceta'' or ''zeta'' (both pronounced the same), or occasionally ''ceda'' or ''zeda'' (again, both pronounced the same).

=Pronunciations of ''c, z''

For more information, see Spanish Dialects And Varieties .

The pronunciation of the letters ''c'' and ''z'' varies. For the most part, Spain is the only country that makes use of the and pronunciations for ''c'' and ''z'', respectively. Most former-Spanish colonies, particularly those in North and South America, pronounce ''c'' and ''z'' identical to ''s'', coming off as and .

ORTHOGRAPHY

Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can guess the pronunciation (adapted for accent) from the written form. These rules are similar, but not the same, as those of other Peninsular languages as Portuguese , Catalan and Galician .

While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are Homophones , because of the language's silent ''h'', vacillations between ''b'' and ''v'', and between ''c'' and ''z'' (and between ''c'', ''z'', and ''s'' in Latin America and some parts of the Peninsula) — the orthography is far more coherent than, say, English Orthography .

Special and modified letters

The vowels can be marked with an Acute Accent (''á, é, í, ó, ú'') for two purposes: to mark stress when it does not follow the normal pattern; or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words (this is the true diacritic usage).

The letter ''ü'' (''u'' with diaeresis) is used between ''g'' and ''e'' or ''i'' to indicate that it should be pronounced (that is, ''gu'' = ). Otherwise, ''gue'' and ''gui'' are pronounced with a hard ''g'' and ignoring the medial ''u''. The diaeresis should not be confused with an Umlaut mark; its function is related to the archaic use of ''ï'' in ''naïve'' or ''ö'' in ''cöoperate''. In this function the diaeresis may occur also in Spanish poetry, occasionally, over the first vowel of a diphthong, to indicate an irregular disyllabic pronunciation required by the metre (''viüda'', to be pronounced as three syllables).

The letter ''ñ'' indicates the palatal nasal .

Stress

Written Spanish unequivocally marks Stress through a series of orthographic rules. The default stress is on the final syllable when the word ends in any consonant other than ''-n'' or ''-s'' and on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable on words that end in a vowel, ''n'' or ''s''. Words that do not follow the default stress have an acute accent over the stressed vowel.

An accent over the "closed" vowel of a diphthong breaks the diphthong (i. e. it produces a hiatus): for example, ''tía'' and ''país'' have two syllables each.

A word with final stress is called Oxytone , (''aguda'' in traditional Spanish grammar texts); a word with penultimate stress is called Paroxytone (''llana'' or ''grave''); a word with antepenultimate stress (stress on the third last syllable) is called Proparoxytone (''esdrújula''). A word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier does not have a common linguistic term in English, but in Spanish receives the name ''sobresdrújula''. All proparoxtyones and ''sobresdrújulas'' have written accent marks.

Diacritic accents

In a number of cases, homonyms are distinguished with written accents on the stressed (or only) syllable: for example, ''te'' (informal object case of "you") vs. ''té'' ("tea"); ''se'' (third person reflexive) vs. ''sé'' ("I know" or imperative "be"); ''tu'' (informal "your") vs. ''tú'' (informal subject case of "you"). When relative and interrogative pronouns are the same (as is often the case), the interrogative pronoun is accented:

¿Dónde vas?

Donde no puedas encontrarme.

Reform proposals

See also: Spelling Reform Of The Spanish Language

There have been several initiatives to reform the spelling of Spanish: Andrés Bello succeeded in making his proposal official in several South American countries, but they later returned to the RAE standard.

Another initiative, the O.R.R.L.I. , remained a curiosity. Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed changing ''-ge-'' and ''-gi'' to ''-je-'' and ''ji'', but this is applied only in editions of his works or His Wife 's. Gabriel García Márquez raised the issue of reform during a congress at Zacatecas , and drew attention to the issue, but no resultant changes. The Academies, however, change several tidbits from time to time.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Spanish Alphabet — Interactive Spanish Alphabet. You will learn how to pronounce all the letters by themselves and in several words.

Listen the Spanish Alphabet — Listen to the Spanish alphabet and to words that use each letter.

Spanish Alphabet - e Learn Spanish Language — Site including .wav files with the pronunciations of all of the traditional 30 letters of the Spanish alphabet.

— Wikibook with extensive coverage of the Spanish letter pronunciation.

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Writing System Of Spanish