Accents on Plurals, or Not?
This is something I have wondered about for a while.
Why do some words have accents in both the singular and the plural,
por exemplo: automóvil, automóviles cardiólogo, cardiólogos
while other words drop the accent in the plural form,
por exemplo: imaginación, imaginaciones canción, canciones
Is there some grammatical rule behind this, or, "that's just the way it is" and one must learn each word on its own merits?
5 Answers
It's a phonetic rule. Automóvil has the tilde because the rule says a word with a final l is pronounced with the stress on the last syllable. The tilde shows that automóvil is an exception to the rule. Automóviles has a tilde to prevent us from pronouncing it with stress on the next to last syllable. The rules for pronunciation, not grammar, will help you with this.
Here is a very short video that explains Spanish syllable stress. link text
This link may come in handy
Canción, as an example, stresses the second syllable. Because it ends in an -n the first syllable would normally be stressed; so, the tilde is needed over the o.
Canciones also stresses the second syllable. However, in this case, the second syllable can be stressed naturally without the tilde (being the penultimate syllable on a word ending in -s), so the tilde is no longer needed.
Sometimes it remains. Sometimes it disappears. You just do whatever needs to be done in the plural to maintain the stress on the same syllable that was stressed in the singular.
Unfortunately, there seem to be no dictionaries or glossaries of Spanish which show us the accepted syllibification. There surely must be rules governing the approved method, but haven't seem them discussed in this forum or any of the lessons I've taken so far.
Reference Section --> Spanish Grammar --> Pronunciation --> Syllables - How to Divide Spanish Words
The grammatical general "rule" is: If the word ends in a vowel or "n" or "s" the penultimate (next to last) syllable is stressed. If the word ends with any other consonant, the last syllable is stressed. When desired pronounciation is other than what it would be when these rules were applied, the tilde or stress mark is used to indicate this (these) rules do not apply and it marks the syllable which IS to be stressed. Unfortunately, there seem to be no dictionaries or glossaries of Spanish which show us the accepted syllibification. There surely must be rules governing the approved method, but haven't seem them discussed in this forum or any of the lessons I've taken so far. I can't recall that my "education" in English dealt much with how English words are divided. Usually, the only time we needed to know how a word is divided was when we were writing and needed to properly divide it at the end of a line. Syllabification in English has little if any impact on pronunciation, but is very important in Spanish pronunciation - and therefore also in spelling because of the need to sometimes add tildes - which is a great aid in learning correct pronunciation when learning "by the book." The rules apply to various forms of words including their plurals and all the conjugated forms of verbs. The word "automovil" without a tilde over the "o" would be stressed on the syllable "vil" according to the general rule (last letter a consonant other than n or s.), but because the desired pronunciation is on the "o", an accent mark is placed over it to show the general rule is not applied when pronouncing this word. If we add "es" to make it a plural form, we have added another syllable - this one ending in "s" The general rule (without indicating otherwise) would be to again place the emphasis on the "vil", the next to last syllable. But, the correct pronounciation is to continue to stress the "o" and in order to let us know that, it needs to be written with the tilde.
I try to guess at the syllabification of Spanish words. I see some combinations of vowels in English which are apparently not treated similarly in Spanish. One example: oa. This combination, in Spanish, unless accented on one of the other seems to be pronounced and orthographically treated as two separate syllables; as in coagular. In English, it is a dipthong as in coat or coal or boat etc. I also see that some dictionaries which try to illustrate the correct pronunciation by English phonetic examples (and these are only the dictionary forms - not including plurals and conjugated forms) are not always reliable indicators of the grammatical division of the word.
