Talk:manténlo

"manténlo" gets way more hits than "mántenlo" on gbooks... DTLHS (talk) 18:36, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

@Stephen G. Brown Do you know if this stress is correct? If so is it true for all verbs with the -tener pattern? DTLHS (talk) 18:44, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

I suppose it would also apply to -poner and -venir verbs. DTLHS (talk) 19:25, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Until recently, it would have been manténlo (i.e., mantén + -lo), because the rule was that, when appending a pronoun to a verb that has as accent, the accent is retained even if the added pronoun makes the stress position regular. In a recent spelling reform (I think it was in the late 1990s), the acute accent was dropped from verbs with appended pronouns when the stress position is regular. So today, it would be mantenlo. It applies to all verbs + enclitic pronouns. The reverse is also common, where an appended pronoun makes the verb's stress position irregular, and so requiring an accent mark: compre + -lo = cómprelo; compre + -me + -lo = cómpremelo. In short, the acute accent is dropped if the stress position is regular, and kept or added if the stress position is irregular.

The regular stress position is the penult if the word ends in a vowel, -n, or -s (the vowels being a, e, i, o, u, but not y). The regular stress position is the last syllable if the word ends in a consonant other than -n or -s. In the few cases of a word ending in a consonant + s, this -s has no effect on the stressed syllable: el bíceps, módems. Also, the letter h has no effect on syllabification, so prohibir is treated as though it were spelled proibir ... the oi (or ohi) is a diphthong, so prohibir is two syllables. But prohíbe/prohíbense (as though it were proíbe/proíbense), because the i is stressed, breaking the diphthong into two distinct syllables. While prohíbe appears to have regular stress (the penult), if the accent were to be left off, the ohi would remain a diphthong and the o is the dominant sound, which is the wrong pronunciation for this word. —Stephen ^(Talk) 02:26, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks- do you think forms like manténlo should be marked as nonstandard or are they still commonly used even after the spelling reform? DTLHS (talk) 02:30, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

They no longer follow the rules, so they should be nonstandard or obsolete. The same story as the many other words left behind by spelling reforms, such as many monosyllable words fué, fuí, fé, dió. There are still a small number of monosyllabic words that need an accent in order to differentiate them from different words with the same spelling, such as sé/se, dé/de, tú/tu, él/el. —Stephen ^(Talk) 02:46, 18 November 2016 (UTC)