LDLD: Spanish. Written Language. Overview of Written Spanish-English Variations.

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• Overview

Writing

• Graphemes

• Accentuation

• Capitalization

• Punctuation

• Spelling

• Composition

• Vocabulary

Reading

• Definition

• Special Considerations

• Reading Stages

• Phonemic Awareness

• Phonics

• Fluency

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• Comprehension

• References

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• Spoken Language

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Home› Languages› Spanish› Written Language

Overview of Written Spanish-English Variations

Spanish	English
Letter/sound correspondence is simple and highly consistent	Letter /sound correspondence is complex and morphophonemic
Spanish common words are generally long with (2,3 syllables)	Common words are generally short (1, 2 syllables)
Verb conjugations are very elaborate and highly inflected: Yo hablé. Tú hablaste. Ella/el habló. Nosotros hablamos. Usted habló. Ellos/ellas hablaron.	Verbs conjugations are not very elaborate or distinctive: I talked. You talked. S/he talked. We talked. You [formal voice] talked. They talked.
Spanish is very predictable at the phonics level but less predictable at the syntactic level	English is very predictable at the syntactic level but less predictable at the phonics level.
Spelling in Spanish is very predictable due to its high degree of consistency between letters and sounds.	Spelling in English is complex due to its low degree of consistency between letters and sounds. One sound may represented by a number of spellings (long a: a-e, ai, ay, eigh)
Spanish is a syllabic language. Any word is composed of syllables that are auditorily easy to identify by anyone Sa/bi/du/ria (wisdom) Spanish dictionaries do not carry syllable division markers, because it not necessary; the word breaks are easily apparent when the word is spoken.	English is a morphophonemic language Words are composed of syllables that are morphemes with a pronunciation that is not easily divided into syllables. English dictionaries carry syllable division markers due to the nature of its morphophonemic structure & complexity.
The stressed syllable in a Spanish word is consistently predictable. There are mainly three positions for syllable stress: last syllable (acute words), the one before last (palabras graves), and the third before last (palabras esdrújulas).	The stressed syllable in an English word is not consistently predictable. English Dictionaries carry markers to indicate which syllable is stressed.