THE SPANISH BEYOND THE RULE: THE ORIGIN OF WORDS ACCORDING TO ITS POSITION (ACUTE, GRAVES, ESDRÚJULAS AND SOBRESDRÚJULAS).

“-Ju Oh ¿Did you understand the accents in Spanish?

-Yes, Teacher Adri, but I have questions:

                           ¿Why are they, graves, esdrújulas?

-                                    Because Spanish grammar says so” “

This is a very poor answer coming from a Spanish teacher, right?

There are four main events that led stress in acute, graves, esdrújulas y sobresdrújulas words in Spanish. These are:

   Flexible Language: Both Greek old and Latin are flexible languages. They characterize for their many prefixes and suffixes and these are made by bending some words. This way Spanish is a romance and flexible language and at the same time merging. 

   Pitch Accent: Pitch accent is a feature of certain languages whereby variations in pitch (linguistic tones) can be used to differentiate words, but where the potentially distinctive tones are restricted to only one or two syllables within a word – as opposed to fully tonal languages like Standard Chinese, where each syllable can have an independent tone.  This kind of stress is used in Ancient Greek in which the stress is given by the voice pitch, where the vocal chords tense with the stressed syllable. In Latin the stress is more obvious in the voice prominence and the effort when breathing. Both influenced in some way the spoken Spanish use of stress, especially Latin.

  Grammatical Emphasis: Vulgar Latin is the language that originated phonic oriented words, in higher percentage than Arabic and Ancient Greek. At first, accents didn’t have any marks or signs, unlike ancient Greek. Only until the Middle Ages, the Spanish language mark the stresses in stressed words when necessary

     

Acentuation Origins:   Most of the stress in Spanish words come from Latin, both ancient and vulgar.  It is well known that Latin went through periods where the stress was musical, and others where it was of intensity. What we must know is that the stress in words depends in the number of syllables it has. Words with acute stress aren´t common in Latin, unless they show symptoms of elision or suppression of syllables. Latin doesn’t have as many acute words as Greek does. This can be study in ancient Greek phonetics: acute, grave and circumflex. With regard to the sobresdrújulas, they owe their origin to the use of gerunds and the imperative to which unstressed pronouns are added. Such characteristics become more visible in ancient Latin than in Greek old.

    The Words ending in any consonant except -n or -s are stressed on the last syllable, these are called acute. Words ending in a vowel, -n, or -s are stressed on the next to the last (penultimate) syllable. These are called graves.  When words end in any letter, and have the stress in the second to last syllable, are called “Esdrújulas”. When words end in any letter and have the stress in the third to last syllable, are called “Sobreesdrújulas”. 

    In synthesis, the stress in Spanish words (acute, graves, esdrújulas y sobresdrújulas) come from both: Latin and ancient Greek. They are transformations from these languages. 

Written by Adriana Martinez