The Río Ene is part of the headwaters of the Amazon River whose origin is at the Nevado Mismi south of Cuzco where it first becomes Apurímac River, then the Ene River and Tambo River before its waters meet the Ucayali River which later forms the Amazon.

The Ene is formed at at the confluence of the Mantaro River and the Apurímac River, circa 400 m above sea level, where the three Peruvian Regions Junín, Cusco, and Ayacucho meet.

The river flows in a northwesterly direction at a total length of 180.6 km.

At Río Ene joins Perené River, at the town of Puerto Prado, 295 m above sea level, and is called the Tambo from then on.

Ñ (lower case ñ) is a letter of the modern Roman alphabet formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is most notably used in the Spanish alphabet and Filipino alphabet, where it represents a palatal nasal (ɲ).

Unlike many other alphabets that use diacritic marks (such as ü in Asturian, Leonese, in Spanish, Galician and Filipino), Ñ is considered a letter in its own right, with its own name (eñe) and its own place in the alphabet (after N).

History

Already in medieval Latin palæography, the sign that in Spanish came to be called 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 and Portuguese 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".

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 didn't derive from an original "nn", as for leña (from Latin "ligna", which didn't involve "nn").

The palatal nasal sound is roughly reminiscent of the consonant cluster /nj/ as in "onion" ˈʌnjən. 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").

Other Romance languages have different spellings for this phoneme: Italian and French use "gn", a consonant cluster that had evolved to it from Latin also in Spanish (see leña above), whereas Portuguese and Occitan ("nh") or Catalan ("ny") chose other digraphs with no etymological precedent.

When the Morse Code was extended to international languages, a symbol was alloted for this character, though it is not used in English (— — · — — ).

Although the letter "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.

Cross-linguistic usage

In Crimean Tatar alphabet, it represents the velar nasal sound, when writing the Tatar language in Latin script.

In the Breton language, it nasalises the preceding vowel as in Jañ /ʒã/ which corresponds to the French name Jean and bears the same pronunciation.

It is used in a number of English words of Spanish origin, such as jalapeño, piña colada, and piñata. The Spanish word cañón, however, became the English word canyon. Until the middle of the 20th century, adapting it to "nn" was more common in English, as in the phrase "Battle of Corunna". Nowadays, it is almost always left alone.

In the orthography for languages of Senegal, ñ represents the palatal nasal. Senegal is unique among countries of West Africa in using this letter.

Cultural significance

In 1991 a European Community report recommended the repeal of a regulation preventing the sale in Spain of computer products not supporting "all the characteristics of the Spanish writing system", claiming that it was a protectionist measure against the principles of the free market. This would have allowed the distribution of keyboards without an "Ñ" key. The Real Academia Española stated that the matter was a serious attack against the language. Nobel Prize winner in literature Gabriel García Márquez expressed his disdain over the elimination of the eñe by saying: “The 'Ñ' is not an archaeological piece of junk, but just the opposite: a cultural leap of a Romance language that left the others behind in expressing with only one letter a sound that other languages continue to express with two”.

Among other forms of controversy are those pertaining to the anglicization of Spanish surnames. Such personal decisions can be perceived by the Spanish community as denying identity and heritage. The replacement of "ñ" with another letter alters the pronunciation and meaning of a word or name, in the same manner as replacing any letter with a different one would. Peña is a common Spanish surname and a common noun that means "ridge," it is often anglicized into Pena, changing the name into the Spanish word for “embarrassment” and “sorrow”. Another common example: "año" means "year", but "ano" means "anus".

Computer usage

In HTML character entity reference the codes are Ñ and ñ or Ñ and ñ.

On the Apple Macintosh operating system it can be typed by pressing the [Option] key then typing n followed by either N or n.

To make a lowercase ñ on the Microsoft Windows operating system, hold down the ALT key and press the numbers 164 or 0241 on the numeric keypad (with Num Lock ON). To make an uppercase Ñ, press ALT + 165 or 0209. The Character Map Windows application identifies the letter as "Latin Small/Capital Letter N With Tilde".

Another option is to configure the system to use the US-International keyboard layout, where the ñ can be produced either by Alt Gr + N, or by typing the tilde (~) followed by the letter n.

Notes

See also

• List of English words with diacritics
• Real Academia Española
• Tilde

Other symbols for the palatal nasal

• Gn (digraph)
• Nh (digraph)
• Nj (letter)
• Ny (digraph)
• Ɲ
• ń
• Ң
• Њ
• Ň

Other letters with a tilde

• Ã
• Ẽ
• Õ
• P̃

Boxing the compass is the action of naming all thirty-two principal points of the compass in clockwise order. It was also used as in naval slang as a description of a ship (typically one that had lost a rudder or had no one manning it) slowly revolving in a calm sea in a "directionless" manner, thus pointing through all of the compass points, sometimes reversing itself.

Such names, formed by the initials of the cardinal directions and their intermediate ordinal directions, are accepted internationally, even though they have their origin in the English language, and are very handy to refer to a heading (or a course) in a general or colloquial fashion, without having to resort to computing or recalling angle numbers. Despite the name of the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, there is no such direction. However, old-timers allow three letter directions to have a 'by' inserted beween the first and second letter. Hence, NNW becomes North by Northwest, per Hitchcock's title.

The set of 32 named points can be further extended to a set of 128 named points using fractions , although these fractional points are nearly unheard of.

A simple algorithm can be used to convert a heading to an approximate cardinal direction:

1. Divide the heading in degrees by 360 to get the fraction around the circle.
2. Multiply the result by 32, in the case of 32 named points.
3. Add 0.5 to center the named points in their respective sectors on the circle.
4. Since the 32-point set is used, look up the integer part of the result in the table below after adding 1, since north corresponds to 1 in the table below instead of 0.

For example:

A heading of 75°, divided by 45 gives 1.67, multiplied by 4 gives 6.67, added to 0.5 gives 7.17. 8 in the table below corresponds to east by north.

Compass points

See also

• Heading (disambiguation)
• Course (navigation)
• Bearing (navigation)
• Navigation
• Cardinal direction
• Ordinal direction
• Compass rose
• Wind rose

External links

• Wind Rose – discusses the origins of the names for compass directions.