Hello friends, welcome to the course of, How to learn Spanish in less than three months?
If you are new to my blog and would like to learn the Spanish language from scratch, well you are in the right place, throughout this series of courses that I will be publishing every week, I will share with you techniques, tips and some primordial advice that you should keep in mind so that you can speak and write Spanish in less than three months.
Without further ado, if you are ready I am ready too, let's get started!
What is the origin of the Spanish alphabet?
According to the story, the origin of the
Spanish alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet, which in turn descends from
the Greek alphabet. And in turn the Greeks adopted the letters of the
Phoenician alphabet, which had the influences of the Hebrew and Egyptian
culture.
And as you will notice, thanks to that mixture
of cultures, the alphabet we know today was gradually built.
It should be remembered that the Latins discarded four graphemes of the well-known Greek alphabet, took the Etruscan F, and also adopted the Etruscan S.
The Romans used the C, K and Q to write the /k/ sound, the C also adopted the /g/ sound. Later they invented the letter G, adding a stick to the C, and inserted it between the F and the H for reasons that are still unknown. Once the Roman Empire conquered Greece, the letter Z was reintroduced and the letter Y was adopted to transcribe the Greek words that were borrowed, placing it at the end of the alphabet. In this way, and after the ephemeral letters introduced by Claudius disappeared, the Latin alphabet remained with approximately 23 letters for the rest of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
On the other hand, the Germanic peoples once Christianized adopted the Latin alphabet. And the Anglo-Saxons temporarily introduced two runes in their alphabet, thorn "Þ" and wyn "ƿ", to transcribe two sounds of their language not represented by the Latin letters, /θ/ and /w/, at that time respectively, but they ended up discarding them because they could be confused with the letter P. On the other hand, the letter Wyn was replaced by two consecutive uves, which ended up linking and originating a new letter: the W. At the end of the Middle Ages, the V began to be rounded off to differentiate when it corresponded to its vowel sound, originating the U. J, which began to develop from the I in the 15th century.
The Ñ originated in Spain due to the
custom of the medieval copyists of placing a small line above an ene to
indicate that it was double, thus saving space, when the "nn" changed
its sound palatalizing, /ɲ/,
the eñe
was adopted as a new letter in the Spanish alphabet that we know today.
We can also say that for the Greeks the letter Z
was a double letter, since it expressed the sound of the union of delta and
sigma. The Romans only used it to transcribe some Greek words, but they stopped
using it at the end of the 4th century B.C. Three centuries later it was
introduced again in the Roman alphabet, together with the letter Y, to
transcribe Greek words such as Zeus or Zodiac and it was placed at the last
place in the alphabet.
The Spanish alphabet was fixed, in the year 1803,
in twenty-nine graphemes (27 letters and two digits), each of which can adopt
the figure and size of capital or small letters that we know today.
The Spanish Alphabet
The Spanish alphabet or better known as abecedario is made up
of 27 letters and 5 digits or two-letter combinations, according to the
official grammar of the Spanish Language (RAE). The letters of the alphabet are
made up of 27 letters since 2010 and the number is the same for all
Spanish-speaking countries.
How many letters does the Spanish alphabet contain?
vowels and consonants
As we well know thanks to the union of the vowels plus the consonants is how words are formed in the Spanish alphabet, if there were no vowels or consonants communication in Spanish would be impossible.
Observation of vowels and consonants
The first observation you should keep in mind is that, the only letters that have a tilde are only vowels, and for them to have a tilde, it has to be based on a rule of punctuation marks.
On the other hand, no consonant has a tilde.
Example:
What does that sign of the letter Ñ mean?
The letter Ñ at the top shows as a sign, that sign is known as the virgulilla is an orthographic sign in the form of a comma, scratch or stroke. The virgulilla is generally identified as the tilde of the eñe or virgulilla of the eñe (~), it is the only consonant in the entire Spanish alphabet that carries this sign and serves to differentiate the letter N from the letter Ñ.
Homework
Video explaining the vowels
Below you will find the working materials, so you can practice at home.
What does that sign of the letter Ñ mea
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