The letter “ñ”, the identity of Spanish in the world | Culture

In English

Letter of thanks not we can dream, blink, add, teach and much more. Children, we learned about onomatopoeia Yum and also to put the little comma which, like a hat or an eyebrow on the letter not, formed on not. Without him, there would be no tomorrow, no year, no nails, no fall, no piñatas. You could not say Spanish, of course, nor have a beer, nor the same construction would exist, but with two oes: this vulgar interjection to show the anger or the bad mood also so Spanish … not This is a characteristic that has not always been there and that not only exists in the Spanish language, but is constantly claimed there.

The not It is the fifteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet and the twelfth consonant. Over 15,700 words in Spanish contain it and over 350 begin with this consonant with a palatine nasal sound. On April 23, in which we celebrate the Day of the Book, but also since 2010 the Day of the Spanish Language by a declaration of the United Nations, the letter not participates in this tribute for its uniqueness compared to the rest of the languages ​​of the world and for being a graphic icon of the Spanish language.

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You have to go back 200 years, to the beginning of the 19th century, to see the first official recognition of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) to the letter not by including it in the dictionary in 1803. However, its origin is much older and also more casual, having to go back to the Middle Ages.

Neither the letter nor the sound eñe existed in Latin, but as it evolved and Romance languages ​​such as Spanish, French or Italian began to emerge, this nasal palatine sound appeared. , which means that air comes out through the nose when pronounced and the back of the tongue rests against the palate, and which we identify as eñe.

In the Middle Ages, monks were the scholars of society. Monasteries were the great centers of wisdom, where they served as copyists and scribes and had large libraries. The theory of the origin of the letter not tradition places it at this historic moment because of the lack of rollers due to their high cost and to save time. Apparently the monks were forced to shorten a few duplicate letters to fit as many words as possible on each line. In fact, one of the first letters not of history, we find it in a text dated 1176.

The explanation for this theory is that a horizontal line was written over the duplicate letter that was not removed, known today as the virgulilla (~) because it looked like a snake. That is, what we call the letter not is in fact the result of the abbreviation of two enes consecutive: thus, for example, gave Dona emerged.

The sound of the new letter also has its own theory. According to this, the eñe emerged to give voice to certain phonemes inherited from Latin that appeared in the 9th century as different ways of transcribing sound. Among these combinations were the double not with words like dose (year), mn with words like thin (hurt), gn with words like fist (fist), ng with words like inferior (growl) and the syllable no more than a vowel in words like Senior (Sir).

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These letter compositions implied an investment of time for the monks, so in their eagerness to save different adaptations arose according to the languages. Castilian and Galician have chosen this formula of not written and spoken, while the Portuguese created the combination nh (Espanha), the French and the Italians opted for the combination gn (Spain) and Catalan introduced the formula New (Spain).

The combination of previous phonemes continued to be used interchangeably until the 13th century, when King Alfonso X, The wise man carried out the spelling reform following its policy of linguistic unification. The monarch, true to his nickname, was a great reader, writer and intellectual of the time, and he presented eñe as the preferred option to reproduce previous phonetic combinations and thus establish the first rules of Castilian. When its use was widespread throughout the Iberian Peninsula, Antonio de Nebrija included the not in the first Spanish grammar of 1492.

But the conquests and the changes of letter not Throughout over a thousand years of history, they also had recent shock, and it was even on the verge of fading away, at least in writing …

The nightmare dates back to the 90s of the last century, when, at the request of the then European Economic Community (EEC), it was proposed to eliminate the not promote the uniformity of writing keyboards for technological devices. It was thus a question of giving priority to the free market and to condemn a measure qualified as protectionist with Spain and its letter not. In fact, the internet marginalized this letter (with accents and umlauts), which could not appear in email addresses or web domains in Spain until October 2, 2007.

To Spanish, the second most spoken language in the world with nearly 600 million people today, not, the the defenders came from inside and outside Spain. Even Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez vehemently protested against injustice and indignation: “It is scandalous that the European Community has dared to propose to Spain the elimination of not for professional reasons only. Perpetrators of such abuse and arrogance should know that the not It is not an archaeological antiquity, but quite the contrary: a cultural leap from a Romance language which left the others behind by expressing with a single letter a sound which in other languages ​​continues to be expressed with two ” .

The controversy ended when the Spanish government, to consolidate the protection of the letter not, approved a royal decree on 23 April 1993 which maintained the obligation of not on keyboards, under the Maastricht Treaty, which allowed cultural exceptions that already existed before the creation of the EU.

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In the 21st century, the letter not it has become a symbol widely used to represent the identity of the Castilian language. For example, publisher Bill Teck, author of Official Dictionary of Spanglish, called Hispanic culture and its influence in the United States as Generation Ñ, and published a magazine with that name. The year has also been the claim of sports teams and organizations such as the Cervantes Institute and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which have adopted the letter as their trademark.

Little by little, I am it is also in the process of standardizing itself in the English language. It appears in English in some terms of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, piña colada, and El Niño, although in other words, like the Spanish canon, they have been adapted as New, so the Grand Canyon of Colorado is written grand canyon. Until the middle of the 20th century, the adaptation of not What nn was most common in English, as in the sentence Battle of La Coruna, but nowadays the Spanish spelling is almost always respected, and there is even an association called Society for the Advancement of Spanish Letters in the Anglo Americas (SASLAA), responsible for promoting the permanent adoption of not in English language.

However, neither the letter nor the phoneme are exclusive to Spanish. In the Iberian Peninsula, both Galician, Asturian and Basque, although in a very limited way, use it. In Latin America there are many indigenous languages ​​such as Mixtec, Zapotec, Otomí, Quechua, Aymara, Mapuche and Guaraní which also have the not in their alphabets. Other cultures that have also had contact with Spanish have the not, such as papamiento from Curacao, Tagalog and apricot from the Philippines, bubi from Equatorial Guinea or chamorro from Guam.

It is also used by Crimean Tatar, Malay and Nauruan, and in the case of many Senegalese languages; for example in the Wolof language, the not it is used as in Spanish for the palatal nasal sound. Senegal is the only country in West Africa to use this letter. Likewise, the Tetun language of East Timor also adopted the not to represent the same sound in the Portuguese loans represented by nh.

Long live to the letter not the day of the Spanish language. It is the only letter originating in Spain and that despite its exceptional character, as it is very rare and usually only appears 0.3 times out of 100 words, it contains a personality, both in its graphics and in its pronunciation, an important part of the Hispanic cultural identity in the world.