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Ñ (lower case ñ, International Phonetic Alphabet: "''énye''") is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by placing a diacritical tilde on top of an ''N''. It is used in the Spanish, Galician, Asturian, Basque, old Aragonese (''Grafía de Uesca de 1987''), Breton, Filipino, Chamorro, Guarani, Quechua, Mapudungun, Malagasy, and Mandinka alphabets, as well as in Latin transliteration of Tocharian and Sanskrit, where it represents . It represents in Crimean Tatar, and in the Rohingya languages it denotes nasalization of the preceding vowel. Unlike many other alphabets that use diacritic marks (such as ''ü'' in Asturian, Galician, Leonese, and Spanish), ''Ñ'' is considered a letter in its own right in these languages, with its own name (''eñe'', pronounced "enye") and its own place in the alphabet (after ''N''). From this point of view, its alphabetical independence is similar to the English ''W'' (which historically came from a doubled ''V'', just as ''Ñ'' came from a doubled ''N''). ==History== Historically, ''ñ'' arose as a ligature of ''nn'': the tilde was shorthand for the second ''n'', written over the first.〔Buitrago, A., Torijano, J. A.: "Diccionario del origen de las palabras". Espasa Calpe, S. A., Madrid, 1998. 〕 This is a letter in the Spanish alphabet which is used for many words, for example, the Spanish word ''año'' (''anno'' in Old Spanish) "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 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''. The word ''tilde'' comes from Spanish, derived by metathesis of the word ''título'' as ''tidlo'', this originally from Latin TITULUS "title" or "heading"; compare ''cabildo'' with Latun CAPITULUM.〔Oxford English Dictionary〕 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 in ''leña'' (from Latin ''ligna'') or ''señor'' (from Latin ''senior''). The palatal nasal sound is roughly reminiscent of the English consonant cluster in ''onion'' . 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'' (''cañón'' in Spanish). Other Romance languages have different spellings for this sound: Italian and French use ''gn'', a consonant cluster that had evolved to it from Latin also in Spanish (see ''leña'' above), whereas Occitan and Portuguese (''nh'') and Catalan (''ny'') chose other digraphs with no etymological precedent. When Morse code was extended to cover languages other than English, the sequence ( — — · — — ) was allotted for this character, though it is not used in English Morse code. Although ''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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ñ」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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