Job Discussion Forums

[Tamara]

One of our Hispanic ESL students is telling us something completely different than what we learned when we studied Spanish. We learned to always capitalize the "U" in Usted when abbreviated. So, even if it comes in the middle of a sentence, we write Ud. or Uds. capitalized.

The student is saying that you never capitalize based on the abbreviation. As I understand her, she says you'd only capitalize the abbreviation if it's at the beginning of a sentence. This student has a university education from El Salvador.

Can you shed some light on this topic? TIA.

[justcolleen]

I obtained my knowledge of the language from five different people, of five different ethnicities. Two were native English speakers, one American and one British. The other three were from Peru, Venezuela, and the Bosque region of Spain. The differences, across the board, were amazing.

Colleen

[moonraven]

www.elcastellano.org indicates that the abbreviation is to be capitalized, but that usted with all of its letters is only to be capitalized when it begins a sentence. I have received memos from folks here in Mexico at the university where usted--not the abbreviation--was capitalized in the middle of a sentence. A university education is no guarantee of much of anything.

[Phil_b]

There's quite an interesting section on the bbc website (all in Spanish, I'm afraid) on variations in Spanish (and other things)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/specials/2004/congreso_lengua/default.stm#

[Stephen Jones]

The traditional way of spelling the abbreviation is 'Vd' as 'usted' is itself an abbreviation of Vuestra merced'.