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Comment by ar-jan | Hacker News Reader

* vicuña.

English is such a plastic language that it even imports diacritics from other languages! Still, vicuna is also correct in English: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vicuna

But I guess importing letters from different alphabets is the limit.

EDIT: Actually ñ is a letter in the Spanish alphabet, so in this case, English has imported a foreign letter.

Note, if following old Spanish orthography one could simply spell vicuna with a double “n” as in “vicunna” and remain accurate. The thing above the n in the Spanish spelling of vicuna is actually a miniature “n”. So it’s a sort of stacked n digraph.

That doesn't hold for modern orthography though. Two consecutive ns (e.g. in words innato and perenne) are not pronounced as ñ.

Look at us arguing over English transliterated spelling rules again, as though it actually cared how much of another language's blood it spills as it hacks the raw, pulsing vocabulary out of their dictionary.

English will spell it as vicuna, vicuña, vicugna (like lasagna), vicunia, and vicunya, all at the same time, and Español will sit down and enjoy it, if it doesn't want its vowels mispronounced in an entirely new way.

True, but it holds for English orthography, and in this transliteration. Spanish writers can continue to use the digraph, of course.

> The thing above the n in the Spanish spelling of vicuna is actually a miniature “n”.

“originated as” is vastly more accurate than “is”; you wouldn't say that thing between the numbers in “1 + 2” is a ligature for the letter pair “et”, would you?

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