Spanish idiosyncratic punctuation ways

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Hani, Dec 14, 2009.

  1. Hani Registered Senior Member

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    271
    Hello,

    I am learning Spanish, and I am irritated by the way the marks "?" and "!" are used in that language. Why don't they use them like everybody else? What is the story behind the Spanish weird way of using these two marks?
     
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  3. D H Some other guy Valued Senior Member

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    Everyone else? Punctuation varies a lot between languages.

    This is a clever invention. When you here someone speaking, the tone of their voice tells you from the start of the sentence on that they are asking a question or getting hot and bothered. When you read something written in English, you don't know this until your eyes see the punctional mark at the end of the sentence. Some meaning is lost in the translation from spoken to written word. Spanish regains that lost meaning. Just like the spoken word, written Spanish lets the reader know from the very onset that the sentence being read is something special such as a question or a command.
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Then you really won't like their quotation marks!
    Indeed. Periods and commas are pretty standard in languages that use the Roman, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but other punctuation varies enormously. Quotation marks in particular come in quite a variety. French uses « and » , Spanish uses an em dash at both ends, many languages use single quotes instead of double and then nest them the opposite of our way, and some use these: „ ‟ . Many symbols are used in place of the colon and semicolon.

    Most languages do not capitalize nationalities, languages, etc. Je parle anglais, mi padre es americano, ich habe einen französischen Hund. (German capitalizes all nouns.)

    The Brits generally don't put a period after Mr Dr and other common abbreviations, and they're much less generous with commas than Americans.
    Actually that's not a good example because English syntax usually identifies questions.
    • Who were you talking to
    • Is there a point to this discussion
    • Where are my socks
    You have to get into colloquial speech before tone and volume become the only indicators: "They charged you a hundred dollars to change a flat tire?" "You played Second Life all night instead of studying for your exam?"

    In other languages there is more ambiguity. Spanish uses question words like who where how the same as English, but other questions are not always easy to see coming. Llueve. means "it's raining." whereas ¿Llueve? means "is it raining?" Nonetheless Spanish always places the inverted question mark before all questions, whether they're easy to spot or not.

    Since tone is phonemic in Chinese it can't be used to identify questions or exclamations. Any question that does not contain a question word like what or when uses the adverb ma at the end, which means "true or false?" Ni hao means "you are well." Ni hao ma means "How are you?" and is a standard greeting just as in English.

    Yiddish uses the particle tzi to identify questions that have no question words, only it goes in front so you can see it coming. This is used even though Yiddish word order is almost identical to German so you can tell by the sequence of the subject and verb whether it's a question. Du kanst yidish lezn = "You can read Yiddish." Tzi kanst du yidish lezn = "Can you read Yiddish?"

    Russian also inserts the particle li after the verb in a question without question words, and it's just as redundant as in Yiddish because the word order gives it away. Vy gavaritye pa russkiy = "You speak Russian." Gavaritye li vy pa russkiy = "Do you speak Russian?" (I transliterated those phonetically instead of using the standard romanization system.)
     
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  7. Hani Registered Senior Member

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    I do know some foreign languages, and I am familiar with the little differences that can exist in punctuation, but I was never irritated as I am now by the Spanish idiosyncrasies, because they are really too much: an inverted question mark at the beginning of a question?! come on... When I first saw that I honestly thought it was an encoding problem in my computer; it looks so stupid.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    If you're going to study foreign languages seriously, and especially if you're going to practice them with native speakers, you're going to have to get over the notion that anything about them is "stupid."

    Perhaps it would be okay if they're linguists, because then they can turn around and talk about the "stupid" way we spell in English, which is only quasi-phonetic. That is a much greater barrier to foreigners learning to read and write (and even native speakers) than a couple of unique yet somewhat logical and consistently written punctuation marks.

    In my observation of many languages over the years that claim to have phonetic writing systems, English and French tie for the record of "stupidest" spelling. Before we chastise the Chinese for their difficult writing system, why don't we try cleaning up our own. Perhaps then we would understand just how difficult it is to reform a writing sytem, when you've got hundreds of millions of people who know the old way and billions of books that were printed that way.
     

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