El Capitan is the Spanish name given to the most emblematic of Yosemite's peaks. It simply means "The Captain". Now, the correct Spanish name for that should be typed "El Capitán". So, which is it? I recall reading an old book of geology from the early 1920s published in the US that calls the Grand Canyon the Grand Cañón of Colorado. I wonder if dropping those accents is merely a convenient way of simplifying spelling because of the lack of accents in English and American keyboards.
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El Capitan or El Capitán?
- Thread starter PeterHolbrook
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Well, english words don't use accents, so I don't think anyone would expect to have El Capitán written with the accent on the a. El Capitán is grammatically correct, though. I also think that maybe the accent was dropped since there are intances where accented letters are displayed as ? or a square.
It's an Americanized proper place name so it gets the American spelling and pronounciation.
Know what's funny? In the us Habanero is pronounced as Habañero mostly but in mexico it's written and pronounced Habanero. Just tossing that in.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habañero
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habañero
Here in Spain we call it "El Gran Cañón del Colorado", so it was the original name given by the Spanish guys who (I don't like to use the word "discover" because there was already native people living there) named most of the places over there. As we usually name it "Nueva York" instead of New York and so on...
In general, for us it is fancy to call things like "Mavericks" or "Magic Mouse" because that sounds good for us. But, "El Capitán" sounds very cheap for us! Maybe for you guys is a quite fancy name, but for us is like "Windows" maybe. I hope you guys in UK/USA understand this point.
The accent is not only a cosmetic thing , here in Spain an accentless word (that has to be accented ) is Considered a serious grammatical error.
Well obviously, since it changes the way you pronounce the word in Spanish. In English, it's context based: e.g. read and read.
Go straight to the National Park Service's Yosemite site and look at how they word it, after all, they're the authority.
http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/formations.htm
They call it El Capitan. So, no, Apple did not drop the accent for the sake of marketing, that's how it is marketed by the National Park Service.
The maps offered by many services such as Google, Bing, and so on are showing it as El Capitan.
In addition, just call it El Cap if you're bothered by it.
http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/formations.htm
They call it El Capitan. So, no, Apple did not drop the accent for the sake of marketing, that's how it is marketed by the National Park Service.
The maps offered by many services such as Google, Bing, and so on are showing it as El Capitan.
In addition, just call it El Cap if you're bothered by it.
Since it's pronounced exactly as its spelt in English then you should know how to pronounce it but if you need it broken down ....
El Cap i tan
It's almost the same as the german word "Kapitän" but without umlaut, so "Kapitan".