Guido van Rossum writes:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:13 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
while at least this Spanish-as-a-second-language learner was taught that `ñ' is an atomic character represented by a discontiguous glyph, like `i', and it is no more related to `n' than `m' is. Users really believe that characters are atomic. Even in the cases of Han characters and Hangul, users think of the characters as being "atomic," but in the sense of Bohr rather than that of Democritus.
Ah, I think this may very well be culture-dependent.
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure it is. Specifically, I heard from a TeX-ie friend that the same accented letter is typeset (and collated) differently in different European languages because in some of them the accent is considered part of the letter (making a different character), while in others accents modify a single underlying character. The ones that consider the letter and accent to constitute a single character also prefer to leave less space, he said.
But in a word like "coëxistentie" (coexistence) the o and e do not form the oe-sound, and to emphasize this to Dutch readers (who believe their spelling is very logical :-), the official spelling puts the umlaut on the e.
American English has the same usage, but it's optional (in particular, you'll see naive, naif, and words like coordinate typeset that way occasionally, for the same reason I suppose). As Hagen Fürstenau points out, with multiple combining characters, there are even more complex possibilities than "the accent is part of the character" and "it's really not", and they may be application- dependent.
Finally, my guess is that the Spanish emphasis on ñ as a separate letter has to do with teaching how it has a separate position in the localized collation sequence, doesn't it?
You'd have to ask Mr. Gonzalez. I suspect he may have taught that way less because of his Castellano upbringing, and more because of the infamous lack of sympathy of American high school students for the fine points of usage in foreign languages.
I'm also curious if ñ occurs as a separate character on Spanish keyboards.
If I'm reading /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/es correctly, it does in X.org: the key that for English users would map to ASCII tilde.