Writing system of Spanish
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Names for the language |
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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.
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Alphabet
The Spanish language is written using the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters: the vowels with an acute accent (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 loanwoards (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 1803 (see the DRAE for the entries on ch and ll). However, in 1994, 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
| Modern letter names | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | a /a/ | J | jota /'xota/ | R | erre /'ere/ |
| B | be /be/ | K | ka /ka/ | S | ese /'ese/ |
| C | ce /θe/ or /se/ | L | ele /'ele/ | T | te /te/ |
| D | de /de/ | M | eme /'eme/ | U | u /u/ |
| E | e /e/ | N | ene /'ene/ | V | uve /'uβe/ |
| F | efe /'efe/ | Ñ | eñe /'eɲe/ | W | uve doble /'uβe 'ðoβle/ |
| G | ge /xe/ | O | o /o/ | X | equis /'ekis/ |
| H | hache /'atʃe/ | P | pe /pe/ | Y | i griega /i'ɣɾjeɣa/ |
| I | i /i/ | Q | cu /ku/ | Z | zeta /θeta/ or /'seta/ |
See International Phonetic Alphabet for the symbols used to represent pronunciation. This table does not feature the traditional names of the letters ch and ll, which are called che /tʃe/ and elle /'eʎe/. 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 lifts 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. Some people give examples of words spelt with the letter e. g. be de burro/ve de vaca.
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.
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 only the country that makes use of the /θe/ and /'θeta/ 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 /se/ and /'seta/. so that is how you say that
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 Portuguese and Catalan.
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 = [gw]). 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 (vïuda, to be pronounced as three syllables).
The letter ñ indicates the palatal nasal [ɲ].
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? "Where are you going?"
- Donde no puedas encontrarme. "Where you cannot find me."
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.RR.L.I., remained a curiosity. Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed changing -ge- and -gi to -je- and ji, but this is only applied 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.
- http://spanish.allinfo-about.com/pronunciation/pr-alphabet.html — Site including .wav files with the pronunciations of all of the traditional 30 letters of the Spanish alphabet.
- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Pronouncing_Spanish_words — Wikibook with extensive coverage of the Spanish letter pronunciation.ca:Alfabet castellà