Décimoquinta letra del alfabeto español. Su nombre es "eñe" y sólo es escrita en español y en polaco (con ligeras diferencias). Sobre la "eñe española", su forma viene de la consonante "N". La tilde sobre la letra tiene su origen en los copistas medievales, usando desde el siglo XII ese signo escrito sobre caracteres escritos dos veces, esto es: Ñ = NN, o por ejemplo Õ = OO. Dos siglos más tarde su uso fue restringido a la letra N. En el siglo XV, Antonio de Nebrija identificó esta letra como signo único del castellano como sonido indígena, dado que no había precedentes griegos, latinos o árabes.¿Puede alguien decir de dónde viene la Ñ polaca?.
Por lo pronto, este enlace lleva hasta un interesante libro en .pdf llamado "Nuestra Ñ", que compila en 51 artículos el correcto uso del lenguaje español. Muy útil para profesores y estudiantes (y asumo que para muchos españoles, como que también).
7 comentarios:
Did you write "Her name" on purpose? In English it should be "its name", because letters have neutral gender.
Greetings,
I am afraid that letters have femenine gender. But thank you anyway.
Hi again.
Letters in Spanish have feminine gender, but not in English. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ñ
In that article Ñ is referred as "it", not "she" or "her".
Another example:
The letter Sigma is written as ς when it comes at the end of a word, elsewhere it is written as σ.
Perhaps current week doesn't seem to be the one in which I'd prefer to argue anyhow (see last post). Honestly, wikipedia as source is not believable while getting on hand a good dictionary.
I am not english native speaker, but letters have femenine gender. "Letter" is a femenine noun.
By the way, there are surely many mistakes in my phrasing as well as gramatics, but I won't change what I posted unless is terrible afterwards.
Sorry if it looks like stubborn spaniards wanting to change Shakespeare's beautiful language.
Hi Traildairy.
Inanimate beings in English don't have grammatical gender. An exception is when sailors say "she" to a ship, but most people say "it". A letter has never been referred to as "she".
An interesting experiment is going to Babel Fish. There you can translate from Spanish into English. For example
"La mujer es bonita y ella es famosa" gives "The woman is pretty and she is famous". But "La letra es bonita y ella es famosa" gives "The letter is pretty and it is famous".
Reading this article is like reading "Look at this house. She is beautiful". "Close the door. She is open". "My chair is old. Her legs are broken". Or in the masculine "This is a book. His author is Cervantes". "My watch is nice. He is alaways accurate". "This is my pencil. He writes very well".
Of course computer translation is not reliable, and maybe Wikipedia isn't either, but have you really read or heard that someone refers to a letter as "she" or "her" instead of "it"? It is impossible. Nobody says "she" to a letter, except a Spanish speaker.
This is pretty weird! Under your perspective you could erase the whole english poetry of about three centuries. Sorry qñerty, letters, ships, countries or even cars have femenine gender. Babelfish, Wikipedia or online grammar posts could describe whatever they want about "what the people say". Open a dictionary and forget about gender lessons.
Read what I posted: "Fifteenth letter of the spanish alphabet. Her name is 'eñe'..." due to my refer to HER. Perhaps it is too old-fashioned way of writing a language. But nevertheless right, because English allows gender definition of many words due to its past character of language with them.
Nowadays an English native speaker comes closer to biological gender meanings, but that is no reason to pretend a perfect world.
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