Agustín Barahona skribis:

>
> Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@...> escribió:
>
> >Except that Spanish only uses the tilde on ñ in which case
> >it denotes palatalizatio.
>
> Again, I think it is interesting to remark only a few minor correction.
> As I've said, Spanish uses the tilde also to indicate intensive
> stress in certain cases -following a few orthographical rules- not
> only to differentiate "ñ" from "n". At least in Spanish language the
> meaning of the term _tilde_ is not exclusively referred to the
> _virgulilla_ -a subcategory of tilde-, i.e., the sign over the "ñ".
> Summarizing, in Spanish a tilde is -following the definition of the
> Real Academia Española- any sign used to distinguish a letter
> from another one or to denote its accentuation. Nevertheless, the
> _tilde virgulilla_ is never used to denote palatalization because
> in our writing we don't use that sign that systematic way.

There was a discussion of this on another list. In English the word
"tilde" refers only to the curly line used as a diacritic. In Spanish,
the word "tilde" means a small stroke used as a diacritic, so it
refers to the acute accents used over vowels as well as the mark
over the "n."

--Ph. D.