Waltzing the Tilde Back Into Sign Language

Mrs. Brannick would have been so very happy today.

The actual degree of her pleasure would have been rather hard to discern, Mrs. Brannick managing to live in a constant state of beatific happiness that defied the hard fact that she was a teacher of seventh-grade Spanish, and as such a martyr to language and learning.

From pale red braids wrapped around head to sandals almost as wide as they were long (which fairly described the configuration of Mrs. Brannick herself), she slept, breathed, inhaled and exhaled Spanish.

That the 17th letter of the Spanish alphabet, N, the N that wears the fetching little tilde on its head, is now officially back in the signage of the City of the Angels would have moved her to bestow one of her beaming “Muy biens” on Councilman Nick Pacheco and the immigrant Spaniard who helped to put the wiggle back in the Spanish street names.

What was lost is found, what had disappeared has resurfaced. On 115 street signs being replaced in the hills above Studio City, the N is back in the city’s official alphabet.

My colleague Daniel Hernandez wrote about this the other day, not as a story of a street-maintenance project but as a story of a sort of civic improvement project, where everything old is new again.

Until about 150 years ago, Spanish and English held virtually equal place in the official discourses of the City of the Angels. And then this became a Yankee city, and the Yankees announced their presence in full voice, a voice that didn’t necessarily include the sounds of accurate Spanish.

In the 20th century, city fathers offered helpful pronunciation guides for the city’s exotic name--in classic old-white-guy pronunciation most memorably fallen from the Nebraska-bred lips of the late Mayor Sam Yorty as “Loss-ANGLE-ess.”

The tilde N is pronounced as if the English letter N were followed by a Y. English spells it “canyon” but Spanish doesn’t have to; it spells it canon (so does the city of Beverly Hills, as in Canon Drive), and it is pronounced just like “canyon.”

To make this easy for you monolinguists, think of Three Stooges dialogue--nyuck, nyuck, nyuck. In Spanish this would be spelled nuck, nuck, nuck. See? Si.

A tilde is no affectation. It is not about caving in to multiculturalism, or about somebody’s idea of “honor.” It’s about getting it right.

The city’s very name, bestowed upon it by the Spanish explorers, was tilde-dependent: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. Without the tilde, the city of La Canada Flintridge would be La Canada Flintridge, and would be getting angry letters from the government in Ottawa demanding to know why its street signs weren’t in English and French.

There are other confusions created by an N-free alphabet: Pena means grief, but Pena is often a surname. And in Mrs. Brannick’s class, the students quickly figured out--and never tired of tittering over--the fact that without the N, the word for year, ano, would become ano, anus. And only in clinical circumstances would one want to receive good wishes for a happy new ano.

The tilde sign itself was doing just fine without Los Angeles’ help. Like so many of those hitherto obscure signs at the top of the keyboard--the ampersand (&), the octothorp (#), and the asterisk (*)--the tilde has made a comeback; it has a place in the Internet addresses for the Los Angeles Chess League and for Sen. Jesse Helms, who has announced he will be giving up his office, tilde included.

The city sees this as a simple matter of correcting misspellings, and has no plans to garnish up the place with all manner of accents. For me, I always felt rather sorry for English; it is so plainly dressed. It has no showy diacritical marks, no umlauts like German, no cedille like French, no circumflex like Vietnamese. Childrens Hospital doesn’t even use a proper apostrophe, as if “childrens” were the plural of “children.” Maybe the city can make that its next project.

Now if you’re booting up to take your mouse and leap to the defense of English, don’t. Even unadorned, English is a luscious dessert-cart of a language, and one that everyone in this country ought to speak, if only for the sake of getting all the jokes on “The Daily Show.”

But for oddity, English can still outweird any other tongue. George Bernard Shaw thought English spelling was ridiculous, and proved it by showing that you can spell the word “fish” as “ghoti.” Take the F sound from the “gh” in “enough,” the I sound from the “o” in “women,” and the SH sound from the “ti” in “action.”

Think we can do without tildes in L.A.? Go fish.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.