The documentation reads :

" The backslash (\) character is used to escape characters that otherwise have a special meaning, such as newline, backslash itself, or the quote character. "

However, 'n' does not "otherwise have a special meaning", nor does it represent a new line.

The backslash character does in fact do two different things :

1) It removes special meanings from characters that have one (\\).
2) It assigns a special meaning to normal characters (\n).

A better description would therefore be :

" The backslash (\) character is used to either escape characters that have a special meaning, such as backslash itself, or the quote character - or give special meaning to characters that do not have one, such as 'n', whose escapment '\n' means 'newline'. "