Woo hoo.... go me, go me..... having spent an interesting half hour on the bus home from Malaga this evening, talking to a Spanish Spanish lecturer from uni in UK, plus this, I'm feeling less cr*p at lengua than I thought I was!! easily please, me....

It`s amazing what you do know when you try, the Spanish are the same, yes I know a little English and they speak it as good as us.

I was going to go total pedant and say 'as well as we....' until I noticed my own typo in the last post. Easily corrected, me...!!!! Night night! I blame the sun!!

Good reply

the 'squiggle' might technically be a tilde (if you look up th definition of tilde)

but you are right Fi - the ñ is a completely separate letter in the abecedario


they put the ¿ at the beginning of the sentence and the ? at the end so you don't miss it!

don't forget that you can make a statement and ask a question using exactly the same words?

called signos de interrogation

In speaking, the difference between a question and statement using the same words is intonation, something that AFAIK, is the same in any western lqnguage.

In speech, maybe.

However if you are to read it, English has its own 'version' of the ¿.......

By switching the subject and auxiliary verb, you get to see how an interrogative is formed.

You can play football. (affirmative)
Can you play football? (interrogative)

Anyway, isn't this thread now hijacked?

exactly - which is why they put the ¿ at the beginning when writing - helps a reader get the intonation right if reading aloud

es tu hija - she's your daughter

¿es tu hija? - is she your daughter?

oops!

thing is, as you know, they don't switch anything around in spanish

All the words in Spanish have "entonación" but just some of them have "tilde". This tilde es el "acento" and it can change completely the meaning of a sentence. For instance:

el envío - you are talking about the delivery
él envió - you are saying that he sent something

So, these two sentences, even they are very similar have a different meaning.

About the "signos de interrogación" As you all know, you must put ¿ in the beginning? at the end, but, lately, people just write the last one (due to the mails and messages in mobile phones each time we write worst and dont write what we should do just for making it easy)

But im sure Lynnxa knows more than me, really. the spanish grammar is studied when you are a child and later, you know how to speak and the way to write but forget the grammar rules. So, only teachers and people from another countries than study our language knows it.
When someone asks me about a rule, i have to think hard and even look the question in grammar books because i dont remember

you are very kind - but there is no way I know more than you!!

I've studied more recently it's true - but by no means have I studied all spanish grammar (yet)

it's possible my 13 year old does though

and it's also true that many of the spanish people I have taught english to know more english grammar better than almost any english person I know!







and I know I don't use capitals on here - I tend to just 'think aloud' without worring about what goes where

As far as I can gather the ñ is the only letter of Spanish origin in the alphabet.

The tilde over a letter was used in the 12th century by Spanish document copiers to replace the need to use double letters. By the 14th century this practise had fallen into disuse except for the ñ. This was subsequently adopted into Spanish as a letter in its own right. There are only a limited number of languages that use it and all of these have all been under Spanish influence at one time or another.

Jiom