Why are people calling an accent mark a tilde?

Question

I am really happy to have found this site. I teach Spanish and this will help a lot. I don't understand why some are calling an accent mark a tilde. A tilde is the squiggly line that goes over the n = ñ.

Welcome to the forum BJ. - Yeser007, Oct 5, 2011

You would expect confirmation from the source...R.A.E..? - kmaakheru, Oct 6, 2011

Answer 1

En España en realidad el simbolo " ´ " se llama tilde, y el acento es la silaba donde se pronuncia mas fuerte.

Por ejemplo: "Ámbar" Á es la tilde y Am es el acento.

Answer 2

Check out this post for some good answers to your question.

Answer 3

English vocabulary has been heavily influenced by French (by comparison, the Spanish influence is almost negligible). The French refer to the "accent grave" and the "accent aigu" which go over vowels (they also use the dieresis but we took that word from the Greek). In French, it refers to a difference in pronunciation of the vowel rather than stress (in the English sense), as French, for practical purposes does not have syllabic stress as English does [although they do have overall intonation within sentences]). Some older people still write, for example, "fianceé" and "divorceé" (The feminine forms in French) in English.

So when it came time to talk about Spanish, English speakers borrowed the term "tilde" to describe the diacritic that Spanish had but the French did not (and, thus, unsurprisingly, had no "native" term for). The English chose not to discard (by then, probably after centuries of using) the term "accent" in favor of the more general "tilde" but simply continued to use "accent" for the diacritic over vowels and only use "tilde" for the "squiggly line" over the 'n' of Spanish.

Thank you samdie, I've often wondered about this, not it makes sense. - Jack-OBrien, Oct 6, 2011

Answer 4

The mark that goes over the ñ (not n, that is a different letter) is the narrow meaning of a tilde. Spanish also has a broader defintion of any mark used to distinguish one letter from another or to show stress which would include accent marks, dieresis, etc.

tilde.

(De tildar).

1. amb. Virgulilla o rasgo que se pone sobre algunas abreviaturas, el que lleva la ñ, y cualquier otro signo que sirva para distinguir una letra de otra o denotar su acentuación. U. m. en f.

Answer 5

La linea sobre la n se llama virgulilla, aunque tilde es tambien correcto pero tilde es mas genericamente aceptado como el simbolo que marca la silaba acentuada

Answer 6

For the same reason people say hola instead of hello.