I was reminded of this the other day when I had to use a computer with a British keyboard layout - I spent ages staring at the strange layout when I wanted a / or a #, but the final nudge to write this blog came when the passport office refused to accept my address as being Caserío Culebrón. They didn't like the tilde, the accent over the i and o. Nowadays, living in Spain, I'd never consider buying a computer with a British keyboard layout for all the faffing about trying to put tildes and Ñ into words by resorting to tricky keystroke sequences.
Spanish needs the tildes to show where the stress in a word goes and, sometimes, just to mark the difference between two words that are spelled the same way but have different meanings - tú for you and tu for your for instance. Or cártel for the drugs organization and cartel for a poster. If English used tildes, we'd be able to tell whether "I read the Times" is something we do habitually, present tense, or something we did yesterday, past tense.
When I first started to learn Spanish, the Spanish alphabet had 29 letters - 26 were shared with we British but CH, LL, and Ñ were three extra - 29 in all. By the way I'm just using capitals to make the combinations stand out more. The decision to remove them the CH and LL was taken in 1994 but some websites say that the letters weren't finally retired till 2010. Even with the CH and LL gone that still left 26 letters because of the ñ/Ñ.
Changing LL and CH didn't cause much fuss. They're just two letters together. Nothing really changed except for the way some words were presented in dictionaries and indexing systems. The Ñ is different. If it had been removed from the dictionary, then something like 15,000 words would have had to be spelled differently and the Spaniards (and other Castilian speakers) were dead against that. I'm sure you know the sound maybe because of the very famous Spanish word, mañana, or because of the name of the country, España.
The Ñ didn't appear in the official Spanish dictionary till 1803, but its history, as an independent, and particularly Spanish letter, goes back well over 1,000 years. Latin doesn't have the sound that the Ñ represents so there is no Latin letter like the Ñ. As memories of the Roman Empire faded in memory and as Romance languages like French, Italian and Castilian Spanish developed, so did a guttural, stressed, N sound. A way of writing the sound down had to be found. The French and the Italians eventually chose GN, the Catalans chose NY, and the Portuguese chose NH. At the time I'm talking about the only people who really wrote things were monks. They were responsible for copying and translating texts as these changes were going on. We know that, in Spanish, the Ñ triumphed, but for a long time, there was no standardization, and two or three ways were used to record this sound, sometimes in the same document. One method was to use a double N. The monks weren't just copying things out with a cheap biro - they were carefully crafting each letter on expensive parchment. The double N used both space and time. The monks found a simple solution, they put a little mark over the N to show that the sound should be read as the guttural N.
In the 13th Century, Alfonso X or Alfonso the Wise, the scholar king who is intimately linked to the reconquest of Murcia by Christians, ruled that the Ñ should be used to represent the guttural N sound. And when Antonio de Nebrija published his first grammar of Castilian in 1492, he too included this letter in his alphabet. The same Ñ is used in a couple of other local languages on the Spanish peninsula, in Galician and Asturian, and it was also used when lots of aboriginal South American languages, such as Quechua and Zapoteco, were first written down. We do exactly the same when we're faced with a name written in Arabic or Japanese script and reproduce it using the 26 letters we have at our disposal.
Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the World. Next up, as mother tongue; it's probably Castilian Spanish. More people speak English than Spanish, but for a lot of those people, it's not their first but a second language. Despite this, in the digital age, there was a real threat to the survival of the Ñ. In 1991, the forerunner of the European Union wanted to standardise computer type keyboards, and, because of the dominance of English in the digital world, the suggestion was for the inclusion of just the 26 "English" letters. The Spanish Government was having none of it though. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1993, the Ñ was enshrined and protected in this bedrock EU document as a cultural heritage.
It's an important letter. There are lots of Spanish words that change meaning completely if the N is changed for an Ñ. A favourite is año for year and ano for anus - one to bear in mind at Christmas card writing time. Cono for cone is not the same as coño which can be a quite strong word to describe an essential part of female anatomy as well as a good all round sort of curse word. There are lots of less exciting examples like cuña, wedge and cuna for cot/crib or mono for monkey and moño for a hair type bun. It goes on.
I wonder what the passport office would have done if I were a British citizen called Muñoz, Peña, or Zuñiga, all of which are pretty common Spanish surnames - ridden roughshod over my identity I suppose and changed my name. After all Michael Portillo pronounces his name in an English not Spanish way despite its origin.
