"The Rain in Spain"

------- "Stays Mainly in the Plain"
---------------- By J. L. Speranza, F. R. S. (failed, etc)
---------------------- For the Grice Club.

----- SINCE OUR RESIDENT GRICEIAN, Jason Kennedy, is living -- for four years now, in Guatemala City (ciudad de Guatemala), I am dropping this unelaborated bit from wiki 'diacritic' as it relates to Spanish. The idea is to consider the Sp. diacritics. I have not found much yet as to what interests the Gricean in me about this. The otiosity, I find, of some diacritics in Spanish. Kramer says, rightly, an 'accent' is cheap, etc. But again, I would be interested to see how in the plains of Castille, the thing got standardised like that. Comments will follow, I hope. Etc.

Another interesting thing, as per below, which should please Kramer, etc, is the 'default' thing. This would make some of the diacritic even more otiose. Unlike Italian. Or English. In Italian or English you can always fail (As a friend commented, a Latvian wife of an Italian man would say, that she was "Lettone", with the wrong accent, coming out as "I am a big bed" rather than "a Lavtian". Ah well.

French is yet a different muffin.


From wiki:

"Spanish uses the acute accent and the diaeresis. The acute is used on a vowel in a stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong as in tío (pronounced [ˈti.o], rather than [ˈtjo] as it would be without the accent). Moreover, the acute can be used to distinguish words that otherwise are spelt alike, such as si ("if") and sí ("yes"), and also to distinguish interrogative and exclamative pronouns from homophones with a different grammatical function, such as donde/¿dónde? ("where"/"where?") or como/¿cómo? ("as"/"how?"). The diaeresis is used only over u (ü) for it to be pronounced [w] in the combinations gue and gui, where u is normally silent, for example ambigüedad. In poetry, the diaeresis may be used on i and u as a way to force a hiatus."