Old rules for accent marks (c 1909)
Hello, all. While researching a recent question on the Reina-Valera version of the Bible which was then answered quite well before I could report back with my findings, I read the first few lines of the 1909 version of the Reina-Valera Bible just to see what it was all about, and was surprised to see the following line:
Y llamó Dios á la expansión Cielos: y fué la tarde y la mañana el día segundo. (Génesis 1:8)
There are accent marks all over the place! Extraneous ones! On the a and the fue! So I read a few more lines to collect a bit more evidence and found that fué and á are always written like that, that vió also gets an accent, and so does dé (as the word for 'from', not the verb) in this version.
Anyway, I was wondering what the deal was here with all the extraneous accent marks. It appears that the rules for when to use them have changed since 1909 and now. Do any of you know what the rules were or when that change took place? I've been looking around on the internet and haven't found anything yet, but just in case anyone else is interested, I'll post anything I find here.
3 Answers
Alright, here is the fruit of my research.
I found an About.com page with a passage from the Reina-Valera version that I thought might address the question, but ended up saying only this:
But there are at least two differences worth nothing: 1) An accent is used over the preposition a, making it á, and the fue form of ser, making it fué. Those accents have disappeared from modern Spanish.
Well, that wasn't very helpful. But then I found a WordReference article, and after sifting through several responses from people who claimed to be old as dirt or relatives of neanderthals but who hadn't given any more specific or helpful clues as to their age, said they remembered learning to do accents that way in school, at least on fué. Finally, someone said the change occurred in 1959. I was ready to confirm that with a bit of Googling, when someone else said it was in 1961. Why, oh why, don't people cite their sources?
So then I went back to my previous search and found a Google Book result for a book in what appears to be the Spanish version of the "For Dummies" books, "Para Dummies." This one is called Español correcto [para dummies] by Fernando Ávila, 2002. Now, I realize it's no RAE publication, but I couldn't find any of the older versions of those which I seem to remember having seen online a while ago. Believe me, I looked. The author did also write an entire book entitled Dónde va la tilde, just like that, with the tilde but no question marks. At any rate, on page 123 of this book, I was introduced to yet another date. According to this Español correcto book, things were going along fine until 1952 when the RAE decided to publish some new rules, and all the tildes I mentioned were excised from the language. He mentions fué, fuí, dió and vió being deprived. He also mentions that, though it was not mentioned explicitly in the decree, á, pié, and fé also parted ways with their tildes at that time.
I also found out in that passage that guión no longer has a tilde! They're changing things around when I'm not looking. I suppose 18-year-olds can't say "Why, back in my day..."
Woosh.
You can add "sólo" (as an adverb) to your list. Back in the day, it always had a tilde. Now it usually doesn't unless the context makes it possible to confuse it with the adjective "solo". I believe that this was a much more recent revision from the RAE (within, say, the last 15-20 years)..
On the whole, the tendency has been to reduce (but not eliminate) the use of accent marks that are not related to pronunciation (stress). The main holdouts are those that distinguish interrogatives/expletives e.g. cómo, cuándo, qué, dónde, etc.
The first Spanish textbooks that I used (late 50's and early 60's) still had fué and dió (but not á). However, bear in mind that there is always a lapse between the RAE changing the rules and when the changes are reflected in published works. I suspect that the typical publisher of a (text)book would say, "Well, we'll change that in the next edition."
THat is so very interesting! I was just given a pile of old Spanish books and one is a little one called 'Thimm's Spanish at a Glance - A New System' published in 1947. I had already noticed that they used straight 'V.' for usted and 'á' for example: 'I am not speaking to you.' 'No es á V. á quien hablo.' It's going to rain: Vá á llover. We are lucky now aren't we, we have less to contend with.
