On Monday, July 05, 2004 1:52 PM Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin va escriure: > From Spanish "cañón"? I'm sure there's an excellent reason to "keep" > the tilde but trash the acute... ;-)
Yes: acute has a different meaning in French orthography (denotes a closed vowel, and can occur twice) than it has in Spanish (denotes stress, and normally occurs at most once). On the other hand, dropping the tilde will: 1) completely modify the prononciation 2) more importantly, completely change the meaning (canon is a completely different word...) Furthermore, perhaps that cañon was borrowed before accents were common... (and much later resurrected) Antoine
