This occurred to me the other day that I have never been taught at what direction an accent is marked when writing a letter. I can imagine two possible directions, e.g. for á:
↗ ↙
a a
(Please ignore the wide gap between the accent and the letter…)
At what direction do you usually mark it? And what is the canonical, if there is, direction? ¡Gracias!
P.S. To be more specific, I mean whether it's from the bottom left to the top right or from the top right to the bottom left since it looks slightly different for hand-writing but no difference at all for printed letters.
But I'm a left-handed and, actually I don't know if the persons who are right-handed write differently.
Mamá, país, canción, etc.
The other thing that came to my mind when I read your post was the position from where you start drawing the tilde, the space you need to leave between the tilde and the vowel and the position of the accent in relation to the vowel.
In my day there were very specific rules for this. I used to have a very strict caligraphy teacher and a special notebook with lines to guide you "draw" your letters. I was taught to make my tildes from top to bottom trying to leave a small space (1 mm?) between the tilde and the vowel on top of the letter. The space was determined by the lines on our caligraphy notebooks. Since people do not write by hand anymore this is no longer an issue and nobody thinks about it but you.
If you look closely to the way computers write the accent on vowels in Spanish you will notice the thicker end at the top (which means it travels from top to bottom); there is a small space between the vowel and the accent and; the accent is placed in the middle of and exactly above the vowel, not on the right or on the left.
Is there anyone out there who still remembers having calygraphy lessons in Spanish in elementary school?
@juanma, really? Wow, that's new to me. I always thought we were supposed to mark it as such: "el café." I have only ever seen the accent slanting in this direction in Spanish, including in books I have read. I usually contrast it with Italian, where the accent tends to be marked in the opposite direction, "il caffè."
So it's really ok for me to write, "el cafè" in Spanish in all situations (everyday communication, essays and other homework for a class, official documents) if I feel like it?
By the way, this is a genuine question, I'm neither a native speaker nor advanced in Spanish.
Thanks for everyone's comments! My Spanish teacher has marked using both directions on the chalkboard so I was a bit curious. Although In Chinese there are no letters, but in pinyin I usually write as
→ ↗ ﹀ ↘
a a a a
It seems a bit different from that of Spanish.
