jerezano
Sep 30, 2011, 7:29 AM
Post #65 of 65
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Re: [esperanza] Favorite mexican sayings?
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Hello Esperanza,
You say:>>>>>>>>Mazbook1, what you posted about the 'Mexican government ordering that there be no accents on capital letters' is not the story I know. Unless you can quote me chapter and verse of the order, I'm sticking with what my Mexican friends have told me: back when type was set by hand, there was no room between the lines for an accent on a capital letter and people, including sign painters, simply picked up on what they saw in the newspapers. It's still pretty much the case. Upper case, that is: you still rarely see an accent on the capitalized letters of any written word<<<<<<<<<
A couple things need more clarity: (1) I do a lot of proof reading of old colonial documents both from Mexico and other Latin American countries for Project Gutenberg which is digitizing them for electronic preservation. Those old documents were all typeset by hand. They all have accents (tildes) many of different tyhpes than those used at present. So the lack of space between lines is not quite correct, even for capital letters.
(2) I alway thought, perhaps incorrectly, that with the advent of typewriters, all without the accented characters, Spanish speaking people writing documents, whether official or private, simply could not put the necessary tildes on the letters.
(3) As for the present, the use of accented Capital letters Á Í É etc is quite common in today's newspapers and Spanish books.
Does this help?
as ever jerezano
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