About the tilde in <em>solo</em> and in demonstrations

Abstract

The diacritical tilde was created to differentiate stressed from unstressed words that are identical in writing (de / de, sé / se, él / el). The tilde introduced to distinguish pronouns from demonstrative adjectives (RAE: 1870) and the adverb from the adjective solo (RAE: 1880) does not follow this rule, since it opposes two stressed words. The Spanish Royal Academy has maintained the use of the tilde in these two cases at most in situations of possible ambiguity. In this paper it is proposed to restrict the diacritical tilde use to differentiate only stressed words from unstressed words. On the one hand, real amphibology situations are scarce. On the other hand, applying the criterion of possible ambiguity would lead us to multiply cases of diacritical tilde in an uncontrolled way.