Re: Spanish demonstratives (was: RE: yet another romance conlang)

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:
> >
> >         E'ste es mi padre.        'This(masc.) is my father.'
> >         Este hombre es mi padre.  'This man is my father.'
>
> Well, I doubt there's any possibility of confusion.  If it precedes a
> noun, it's the adjective form, while if it precedes something else, it's
> a noun.  So, it's an interesting orthographic, but ultimately
> non-essential, distinction.  Like como/co'mo and the like.
Yes. Prescriptivism is like that. :) Some time ago, we were
still expected to write an acute over the conjunction _o_
when it was between numbers, to avoid 'confusion' with zero.
Still worse, they could only be confused, at most, if everything
was in block capitals -- but we had to do it in cursive writing
too.

> >         Esto es una casa.   'This is a house.'
>
> Interesting that the accent isn't used there by analogy with
> e'ste/e'sta.  Is it often "miswritten" as "e'sto"?
Prescriptivists don't know what analogy is (or they do, and
hate it). And no, actually the reverse mistake is frequent:
people never remember to write the acutes where needed
(I think that's the second most common mistake -- the first
is exchanging <b> and <v>).


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/draseleq.html