Small Catalan lesson
One of the cool things Spanish keyboards have is that they are adapted for Catalan as well. This opens the door to being able to write in Italian, Portuguese and French effortless since we have all the signs available. Something I like is that accentuated letters don't have special keys, but you need to strike first the accent and then the letter. A few years ago, that was the solution proposed to type the Ñ and the Ç, but romanic languages don't put accents on consonants, so it was considered a sacrilege.
But there's something intriguing in Spanish keyboards which many people outside the Catalan speaking world don't know (and many Catalan speakers don't use): the Interpunct.
I could make a complete definition myself, but I'm using Wikipedia's
"In Catalan, the punt volat (literally, "flown dot") is used between two l's (thus: l·l) in cases where each belongs to a separate syllable (e.g. col·lecció, 'collection'). This is to distinguish the true "double-l" pronunciation from that of the letter-combination ll (without a dot) which in Catalan stands for palatal lateral IPA: /ʎ/ (e.g. castellà, 'Castilian'). In orthographic descriptions, l·l is called ela geminada ("geminate l") and ll doble ela. Although considered as a spelling mistake, a period or a hyphen is frequently used when a middle dot is unavailable: col.lecció or col-lecció. Unicode has unique code points for the letters Ŀ (U+013F) and ŀ (U+0140), but they are compatibility characters and are not frequently used nor recommended.[2] The preferred Unicode representation is l· (U+006C + U+00B7). The use of • bullet (•) is considered inaesthetic.There is no separate keyboard layout for Catalan; punt volat can be typed using Shift-3 in the Spanish (Spain) layout."
When I was studying Catalan language in High School, most of us, who were born Spanish speakers, couldn't really make the double L-L sound (which is very characteristic of Catalan speakers and ressembles Portuguese) which it's almost fusioned with the standard L. And there's no spelling rule on when to use L·L compared to L, so our teacher told us we had to "memorize". Then, as the smart ass I was when I was a teenager, I gave the spelling rule solution which left him without words: "We use l·l in catalan when a similar word exists in another language and has ll". He tried for the whole academic year to find an exception yet he couldn't. For all my teachers, it was considered very rude and generally incorrect to use tricks from different languages to master in one. A rule I always broke and one of the keys for me becoming quite plurilingual.
But there's something intriguing in Spanish keyboards which many people outside the Catalan speaking world don't know (and many Catalan speakers don't use): the Interpunct.
I could make a complete definition myself, but I'm using Wikipedia's
"In Catalan, the punt volat (literally, "flown dot") is used between two l's (thus: l·l) in cases where each belongs to a separate syllable (e.g. col·lecció, 'collection'). This is to distinguish the true "double-l" pronunciation from that of the letter-combination ll (without a dot) which in Catalan stands for palatal lateral IPA: /ʎ/ (e.g. castellà, 'Castilian'). In orthographic descriptions, l·l is called ela geminada ("geminate l") and ll doble ela. Although considered as a spelling mistake, a period or a hyphen is frequently used when a middle dot is unavailable: col.lecció or col-lecció. Unicode has unique code points for the letters Ŀ (U+013F) and ŀ (U+0140), but they are compatibility characters and are not frequently used nor recommended.[2] The preferred Unicode representation is l· (U+006C + U+00B7). The use of • bullet (•) is considered inaesthetic.There is no separate keyboard layout for Catalan; punt volat can be typed using Shift-3 in the Spanish (Spain) layout."
When I was studying Catalan language in High School, most of us, who were born Spanish speakers, couldn't really make the double L-L sound (which is very characteristic of Catalan speakers and ressembles Portuguese) which it's almost fusioned with the standard L. And there's no spelling rule on when to use L·L compared to L, so our teacher told us we had to "memorize". Then, as the smart ass I was when I was a teenager, I gave the spelling rule solution which left him without words: "We use l·l in catalan when a similar word exists in another language and has ll". He tried for the whole academic year to find an exception yet he couldn't. For all my teachers, it was considered very rude and generally incorrect to use tricks from different languages to master in one. A rule I always broke and one of the keys for me becoming quite plurilingual.
- college -> col·legi
- parallel -> paral·lel
- illustration -> il·lustrar, il·lustració