Til is a term that can be used in masculine (tilde) or feminine (tilde). It is the sign that is used to indicate the stress of a word or to differentiate one letter from another.
It is necessary to know, in addition to the above, the etymological origin of this term and this leads us to establish that it derives from Latin. Specifically, it comes from the verb “titulare”, which can be translated as “to put a title”. It is usual for the term to refer to the orthographic accent that, in our language, is placed on the vowels according to the accentuation rules. Thus, the vowels with accents are the following: “á”, “é”, “í”, “ó” and “ú”.
A stress rule indicates that all odd words (stressed from the third to the last syllable) carry stress. That’s why this sign should be included in terms like “compass,” “race track,” and “perimeter.” Serious words (stressed on the penultimate syllable) must have a title, even ending in a vowel, S or N: “tree”, “sugar”, “marble”. The accent always appears in acute words (stressed on the last syllable) that end in a vowel, S or N: “canção”, “jugarás”, “sofá”. It is important to note that there are certain special circumstances that modify these rules. When the accent is not included in words that should have an accent mark, a spelling error occurs. Therefore, if we write “compass” instead of “compass”, or “tree” instead of “tree”, we are wrong. Students are the ones who hate “accents” the most because they have to learn the basic rules of the accent so as not to make mistakes that teachers take into account later in exams. Therefore, it is necessary for them to study hard in this regard and also to practice because it is the way to prevent a good exam from being downgraded to a low grade or even suspended for accents. It should be noted that the hyphen placed on the letter Ñ and Ç is also called a tilde. In these cases, they are used to differentiate between N and Ñ and between C and Ç. In the same way, we cannot forget that the term tilde is also used to designate what an umlaut is, the diacritic sign that has the appearance of a colon and is placed, in the case of Spanish, above the letter “u” when it must be pronounced in the cases in which it forms the syllables “gue” or “gui”. Examples of this type of tilde are those used in words such as “stork”, “beggar”, “penguin” or “ambiguity”, among many others.
The tilde is one of the main differences between Spanish and other languages, such as English. And it is that in the Anglo-Saxon language the orthographic accent, the tilde of the eñe and the cedilla or the umlaut are never used.
