However, as “ gracias” is a Spanish word, let’s see how we write Spanish vowel sounds. Our voices rise and fall during speech to add meaning to our words and emphasize what we say.įor example, Chinese is a highly inflected language with many words that look and sound exactly the same, changing only in meaning when the stress shifts. Stress on certain letters or syllables happens naturally when we speak. The strong vowels are “a, e, o,” and the weak vowels are “u” and “i.” Vowels influence not only the pronunciation of certain consonants but also the stress we place on individual letters. In Spanish, we distinguish between weak and strong or soft and hard vowels. We pronounce the hard “g” because it is followed by a consonant, in this case, an “r.” Therefore, it makes sense, according to the conventional rules. The first sound in the word “ gracias” is the hard “g,” followed by an “r” sound. You also pronounce the hard “g” when another consonant follows it. Use the hard “g” (as in “ go”) when “a, o, u” comes after the “g.” Pronounce the soft sound when the letter “g” is followed by the vowels “e” and “i.” There are clear rules as to when you would pronounce the hard or the soft sound. In Spanish, the letter “g” is used for two different sounds, a hard sound, as in “ go” in English, and a softer sound, as in “lo ch” in Scottish. In the case of “ gracias,” the syllable gra- does not have the desired meaning by itself, so we add the – cias - “ gra-cias.” Now we have a word! Start with “G” The next building block of a word is a syllable, which contains more than one sound, but only one vowel sound, as in the example gra-.Ī single syllable can already have meaning, or you might have to add another syllable to give it meaning. We start with one sound, like “g,” then “r,” and so on. Words are just sounds, ultimately, that we string together to give meaning. Spelling rules are thus based on how words are pronounced. ![]() Speaking came before writing, and humans communicated verbally long before using signs and symbols to translate their speech into images. When we say that “ gracias” follows Spanish’s conventional spelling rules, the first question that comes to mind would be “What are the conventional spelling rules of Spanish?” Let’s have a look at those. We do not write gracias with an acute accent mark because the word conforms to all the conventional pronunciation rules. This means that there is no need for an acute accent. In this case, there are only two syllables, so the first syllable is the second-to-last syllable. The word ends with an “s,” so the stress should fall on the second-to-last syllable. There isn’t another word in Spanish that looks the same, so we don’t need the accent for that reason. When we say this word, we put the stress on the first syllable - gra-cias. So, let us look at the word “ gracias” again. Rule 2: Use the acute accent mark to differentiate between homonyms in the Spanish language: de (of, from) When the stress falls on a soft vowel (i, u) when it is combined with a hard vowel (a, e, o):
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