Ñ
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (April 2010) |
Ñ (lower case ñ) is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet (Grafía de Uesca de 1987), Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents [ɲ]. It is also used in the Crimean Tatar language. In English, it is sometimes called the Spanish N.[citation needed] This also appears in Chamorro, Mandinka, Mapudungun, and Tocharian languages
Unlike many other alphabets that use diacritic marks (such as ü in Asturian, Leonese, Spanish, and Galician), Ñ is considered by these languages a letter in its own right, with its own name (eñe) and its own place in the alphabet (after N). From this point of view, its alphabetical independence is similar to the English W (historically, W and Ñ come from a doubled V and a doubled N, respectively).
History
Historically, "ñ" arose as a ligature of "nn": the tilde was shorthand for the second "n", written over the first.[1] For example, the Spanish word año (year) is derived from Latin ANNVS. Other languages used the macron over an "n" or "m" to indicate simple doubling.
Already in medieval Latin palaeography, the sign that in Spanish came to be called virgulilla (tilde) was used on a vowel to indicate a following nasal consonant (n or m) that had been omitted, as in tãtus for tantus or quã for quam. This usage was passed on to other languages using the Latin alphabet, although it was subsequently dropped by most. Spanish and Portuguese retained it though, in some specific cases. In Spanish in particular it was kept to indicate the palatal nasal, the sound that is now spelt as "ñ". Another word for the Tilde is eñe (en-yeh) The tilde is referred to as an eñe by most of the Spanish speaking countries in Latin America. The word "tilde" came from the Spanish word "título", meaning "title" or "heading" in the English Language. In English the word "tilde" is often used, but it's commonly referred to as an eñe in Spanish.
From spellings of anno abbreviated as ãno, as explained above, the tilde was henceforth transferred on to the "n" and kept as a useful expedient to indicate the new palatal nasal sound that Spanish had developed in that position: año. The sign was also adopted for the same palatal nasal in all other cases, even when it did not derive from an original "nn", as for leña (from Latin "ligna") or señor (from Latin "senior").
The palatal nasal sound is roughly reminiscent of the English consonant cluster /nj/ in "onion" /ˈʌnjən/. While this common description is enough to give a rough idea of the sound, it is not precise (it is analogous to giving the pronunciation of the English word "shot" as "syot"). A closer approximation is the ny in "canyon."
Other Romance languages have different spellings for this phoneme: Italian and French use "gn", a consonant cluster that had evolved to it from Latin also in Spanish (see leña above), whereas Portuguese and Occitan ("nh") or Catalan ("ny") chose other digraphs with no etymological precedent.
When the Morse Code was extended beyond English, a symbol was allotted for this character, though it is not used in English ( — — · — — ).
Although the letter "ñ" is used by other languages whose spellings were influenced by Spanish, it has recently been chosen to represent the identity of the Spanish language, especially as a result of the battle against its obliteration from computer keyboards by an English-led industry.[2]
Cross-linguistic usage
In Spanish and some other languages (Aymara, Quechua, Mapudungún, Guaraní, Filipino, Basque, Chamorro, Galician, Leonese, and Tetum), whose orthographies have some basis in Spanish, it also represents the palatal nasal. Other Romance languages have this sound as well, written "nh" in Portuguese (espanhol) and classical Occitan (espanhòu); "gn" in Italian (spagnolo) and French (espagnol), and "ny" in Catalan and Aragonese (espanyol). The accented letter ń used in Polish, and the symbol ň used in Czech and Slovak are also equivalent to the Spanish letter "ñ". The same sound is written "ny" in Hungarian.
It is also used to represent the velar nasal sound when transliterating both Crimean Tatar in Latin script.
In the Breton language, it nasalises the preceding vowel as in Jañ /ʒã/ which corresponds to the French name Jean and bears the same pronunciation.
It is used in a number of English words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, piña colada, piñata, and El Niño. The Spanish word cañón, however, became the English word canyon. Until the middle of the 20th century, adapting it to "nn" was more common in English, as in the phrase "Battle of Corunna". Nowadays, it is almost always left alone.
In the orthography for languages of Senegal, ñ represents the palatal nasal. Senegal is unique among countries of West Africa in using this letter.
The Lule Sami language contains the letter ń, which often has been written ñ on computers, since ñ but not ń was available on keyboards and the Latin-1 character set.
Cultural significance
The letter "Ñ" has come to represent the identity of the Spanish language. Latino publisher Bill Teck labeled Hispanic culture and its influence on the United States "Generation Ñ" and later started a magazine with that name.[3] Organizations such as the Instituto Cervantes and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have adopted the letter as their mark for Hispanic heritage.
In 1991, a European Community report recommended the repeal of a regulation preventing the sale in Spain of computer products not supporting "all the characteristics of the Spanish writing system," claiming that it was a protectionist measure against the principles of the free market. This would have allowed the distribution of keyboards without an "Ñ" key. The Real Academia Española stated that the matter was a serious attack against the language. Nobel Prize winner in literature Gabriel García Márquez expressed his disdain over the elimination of the eñe by saying: "The 'Ñ' is not an archaeological piece of junk, but just the opposite: a cultural leap of a Romance language that left the others behind in expressing with only one letter a sound that other languages continue to express with two."[2]
Among other forms of controversy are those pertaining to the anglicization of Spanish surnames. Such personal decisions can be perceived by the Spanish community as denying identity and heritage.[citation needed] The replacement of "ñ" with another letter alters the pronunciation and meaning of a word or name, in the same manner as replacing any letter with a different one would. Peña is a common Spanish surname and a common noun that means "rocky hill"; it is often anglicized into Pena, changing the name into the Spanish word for "sorrow" (Mexican Spanish for "embarrassment").
When Federico Peña was first running for mayor of Denver in 1983, the Denver Post printed his name without the tilde as "Pena." But after he won the election they began printing his name complete with tilde.
Computer usage
In Unicode Ñ has code U+00D1 (decimal 209) and ñ has code U+00F1 (decimal 241). Additionally this letter can be generated using combining tilde, ⬚̃, U+0303, decimal 771. In this way n or N followed by U+0303 become ñ or Ñ.
Ñ is a separate key in Spanish keyboard and Latin American keyboard (see the corresponding sections on keyboard layout).
In HTML character entity reference the codes are Ñ and ñ or Ñ and ñ.
On Apple Macintosh operating systems (including Mac OS X), it can be achieved by pressing and holding the Option key then typing "N", followed by typing either "N" or "n".
To make a lowercase ñ on the Microsoft Windows operating system, hold down the Alt key and type the number 164 or 0241 on the numeric keypad (with Num Lock turned on). To make an uppercase Ñ, press Alt-165 or Alt-0209. Character Map in Windows identifies the letter as "Latin Small/Capital Letter N With Tilde".
In Microsoft Word, a capital Ñ can be typed by pressing Control-Shift-Tilde (~), and then typing an "N".
In Linux, an uppercase Ñ can be typed by holding Control and Shift while typing UD1. Similarly, a lowercase ñ can be typed with the code UF1.
Another option (for any operating system) is to configure the system to use the US-International keyboard layout, where the ñ can be produced either by Alt Gr-N, or by typing the tilde (~) followed by the letter n.
Integration with domain names
From late 2001, the letter ñ was accepted as a character usable in domain names. An internationalized domain name having ñ is translated using an algorithm called Punycode, which replaces the ñ (and other non ASCII characters) by a string of letters and digits. For example cabañaspatagonia.cl is translated to xn--cabaaspatagonia-1qb.cl, where "1qb" indicates to insert an ñ in the fifth position after removing "xn--".
Use in URLs
In URLs (except for the domain name), Ñ may be replaced by %C3%91, and ñ by %C3%B1. This is not needed for newer browsers, since for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ñ (link to this article) can be written directly and encoded by the browser. The hex digits are calculated with the UTF-8 encoding, and allows almost any Unicode character to be encoded and is very important to support web content in non-English languages.
See also
Other symbols for the palatal nasal
- Gn (digraph)
- Nh (digraph)
- Nj (letter)
- Ny (digraph)
- Ɲ
- Ń
- Ң
- Њ
- Ň
- [[Palatal_nasal| ɲ (IPA symbol)]]
Other letters with a tilde
Notes
- ^ Buitrago, A., Torijano, J. A.: "Diccionario del origen de las palabras". Espasa Calpe, S. A., Madrid, 1998. Template:Es icon
- ^ a b El triunfo de la ñ - Afirmación de Hispanoamérica Template:Es icon
- ^ Generation-Ñ