The ñ letter, the big star of the Spanish language.
What wouldn’t I find in the Spanish language?
I would like to start the post being frank, just not to disappoint your Spanish language expectations:
· We use an alphabet, what we called both “abecedario” or “alfabeto”. That means that we do not communicate by means of pictures, like Chinese or Japanese people. Besides we do not use many auxiliary symbols, like lines beneath and above or circles. Spanish quite a naked language, just a few, very specific symbols are used with our letters.
· What you say it’s what is written. Actually, Spanish is quite regular in its orthography, but you will find the it a bit confusing when it comes to the use of crossed-sound letters. That’s my coinage for saying that some letters may have different sounds realisations attending to the vowels or consonants that are around. They are rare and quite a few, once you’ve learnt them you can manage Spanish pronounciation perfectly!
What would I find in the Spanish languages?
As it was explained in a former post, the Spanish language is written in the Latin alphabet, that means two things:
· The traditional graphics from the Latin language are used along with some modifications, like the widely known, exclusively Spanish “ñ” and some vowels with auxiliary symbols: á, é, í, ó, ú and ü.
· For every letter there is one sound, or in other words, each sound is associated with one letter. Thus, se lee como se escribe (what is written is pronounced). As it was explained above: more or less. That’s why the next posts are necessary – to become used to the Spanish written system.
Plus, I guess you will find very interesting the matter of doubled usual symbols. One thing that people do not usually expect when learning Spanish is the use of usual graphic symbols, like ‘?’ (signo de interrogación) and ‘!’ (signo de exclamación), doubled! We used them both as well at the beginning of the sentence, but they are written the other way down, upwards; like:
¡Qué guapa que eres! ( You’re such a beauty!)
¿Cómo te llamas? (What’s your name?)
Finally, our quotation marks are always written at the same level, the upper one. This feature coincides with English or Italian, but it differs from languages such as Polish, Russian or German.
El niño dice: “las galletas están muy ricas” (the boy says: “the cookies are quite tasty”)
This is how Spanish looks like in the handwriting of the great poet Federico García Lorca.
In the next posts, I will write about the current Spanish alphabet, the sounds and the orthography. Soon we will all be reading in Spanish!
TakeAwaySpanish 