The origin of the “ñ”: where does the most Spanish letter of the alphabet come from?

We’re so used to seeing it that we don’t stop to think it’s a scarcity. Yes he is. Although as a sound it exists in many languages, as a spelling the “ñ” is deeply Spanish. It is a medieval invention that began with practicality and it ended up being the emblem of our language.

The path of “ñ”

To find the origin of this letter, we have to go to the Middle Ages. In front of their lecterns, the monks where are you going scribes they spread out their parchments and spent hours copying texts that would be fundamental to our culture.

Latin gave way to Romance languages (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian) and you had to copy a lot and spend as little time as possible and as little paper as possible. These unscientific questions gave birth to the “ñ” which is nothing more than a simplification certain combinations or repetitions of letters (nn, mn, gn, nio) that were in Latin. Thus, from the Latin “annus” comes “year”; of “somnus”, “dream”, of “pugnus”, “fist” and of “senior”, “sir”.

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The symbol “ñ” was a means of unify, to resolve this multiplicity of phonetic variations that each copyist transcribed according to his perception. To resolve the confusion, they chose the best path: they opted for the “n” with a hat. They put a little tilde or a check mark on the “n” and put an end to this little Babel.

In all the Romance languages, were these Latin sounds represented by the eñe? No, other languages ​​have made other decisions, the French and the italiano opted for the “gn” combination: Germany, spanish and the Portuguese the forma “nh”, Spain.

Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez is known for his novels and also for having fiercely criticized spelling rules during a language congress. However, in referring to the eñe, it stands out the superiority of Spanish over other Romance languages: “The ñ 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 elsewhere is still expressed with two”.

We all accept that this is our watermark, of course, but this spelling is also found in other languages ​​to represent more or less the same sounds. In Europe, Galician and the Asturian they have it in their writing. In Latin America, languages ​​such as quechua, the guaraní and the mapuche they also record it. If one wonders how he traveled from the Iberian Peninsula, there is an answer linguistic Yes Politics. When the Spaniards arrived in America, they found that the languages ​​of the indigenous peoples did not have an established writing system. When transcribing the spoken word, the spelling “ñ” has been used to represent sounds similar to that of this phoneme in Spanish.

The “ñ” in the dictionary

Although it seems to have been around forever, the Royal Spanish Academy incorporated the letter into the dictionary in 1803. However, its use dates back much earlier. The diversity of spellings began to stabilize when King Alfonso X, the Wise, proposed spelling reform in the 13th century. This sovereign, closely linked to the dissemination of culture, determined the preference of the “ñ” to represent the Latin sounds mentioned above. Although it took so long to reach the dictionary, Antonio de Nebrija, the author of the first Spanish grammar, included it in his work in 1492, the year the Spaniards arrived in America.

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The battle of the keyboard

If a language were powerful because of its size, Spanish would be the second most powerful on the planet because, after Mandarin, it is the most widely spoken in the world. However, power is more favorable to money than to the number of speakers.

This geopolitical dilemma comes to my mind whenever I face a keyboard and can’t see it. The letter that most represents my language is not there and that makes me angry. This is so, it is not that there is no keyboards with this spelling, but in most cases so it’s, But hidden behind another symbol as if it did not have the privilege of occupying a place.

The desire for “unification” led the European Union to demand, at the end of the twentieth century, the deletion of the letter in order to promote uniformity of the keyboard. In David’s fight against Goliath, it’s a triumph that shines behind extravagant alphanumeric combinations.