Jump to content

Diacritic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by WhisperToMe (talk | contribs) at 17:48, 31 July 2004 (→Usage). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. The word derives from Greek διακρητικός, distinguishing.

The mark can be added over, under, or through the letter. Some marks can be diacritics, as well as have other usages. Some marks are considered to be part of the letter, e.g. the dot over "i".

The main usage of a diacritic is to change the phonetic meaning of the letter, but the term is also used in a more general sense of changing the meaning of the letter or even the whole word. Examples are writing numerals in numeral systems, such as early Greek numerals and marking abbreviations with the titlo in old Slavic texts.

Types

Marks that are sometimes diacritics, but also have other uses, are:

Usage

French uses grave, acute, circumflex, cedilla and diaeresis. However, not all diacritics occur on all vowels in French:

  • Acute only occurs on e (é)
  • Grave occurs on e (è), a (à), and u (ù)
  • Circumflex occurs on all vowels: e (ê), a (â), i (î), o (ô), and u (û)
  • Diaeresis occurs on e (ë), i (ï) and y (ÿ) (ÿ is only used in some proper names like Louÿs or placenames like L'Haÿ-Les-Roses)

Several Chinese Romanizations use umlaut, but only on u (ü).

Dutch uses diaeresis. For example in "ruïne" it means that the u and i are separately pronounced in their usual way, and not in the way that the combination ui is normally pronounced. Thus it works as a separation sign and not as an indication for an alternative version of the i. Diacritics can be used for emphasis (érg koud for very cold) or for disambiguation between the numeral one (één appel, one apple) and the indefinite article (een appel, an apple).

Spanish uses acute, diaeresis and tilde. Acute is used on all vowels to mark stress. Tilde is used on n, forming a new letter (ñ) in the Spanish alphabet. Diaeresis is used only over u (ü) so that it is pronounced in the combinations gue and gui (where u is normally silent). In poetry, diaeresis may be used on i and u as a way to force hiatus.

Italian uses acute and grave to indicate irregular stress patterns (as in più, which would otherwise be stressed on the i) and to distinguish words that would otherwise be homographs (such as te ["you"] and tè ["tea"]). In many words, acute and grave are interchangeable.

Portuguese uses acute, grave, circumflex, cedilla, diaeresis and tilde.

Catalan has grave, acute, cedilla and diaeresis.

Welsh uses the circumflex (which it calls tô bach, meaning "little roof") to denote length on any of its seven vowels (aeiouwy). Acute and diaeresis accents are also used occasionally, again on vowels, to denote stress and vowel separation, respectively.

Many Slavic and the Baltic languages use caron to signify either palatalisation or iotation.

Many Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, have Ogonek and Bar.

Romanian uses a breve on the letter a (ă) to indicate the sound schwa.

Turkish uses a G-breve (Ğ), a diaeresis on two vowels (Ö and Ü) to represent rounding, a cedilla on two consonants (Ç and Ş, to represent the affricates /tS/ and /S/) and also possesses a dotted capital İ (and a dotless lowercase ı). Turkish considers each of these a separate letter, rather than a modification of existing characters, however; see Turkish alphabet for more details.

Romanized Japanese (Romaji) uses diacritics to mark long vowels. The commonly-used Hepburn system uses macrons to mark double vowels. The rarely used Kunrei-shiki system uses circumflexes for that purpose.

Esperanto has breve and circumflex.

Vietnamese uses acute (Sắc), grave (Huyền), tilde (Ngã), dot below (Nặng) and Hỏi, and combines up to three of them with a single letter.

Russian has two letters with additional marks. The letter й is now treated as a separate letter and has its place in the alphabet. The letter ё is usually replaced in print by the letter е, although it has a different pronunciation. Ё is still used in children's books and in handwriting. A minimal pair is все (all, pl.) / всё (everything, n. sg.). Acute is also sometimes used in Russian to indicate place of stress (in dictionaries and encyclopedias, or in textbooks for foreigners learning Russian; it also serves to disambiguate meaning (e.g., in Russian pisát means 'to write', but písat means 'to piss')).

In Belarusian language there's a letter ў.

Modern English does not usually have diacritics, which appear only in foreign and loan-words. The letter è is an exception, used to modify the pronunciation of words ending in -ed within poetry and songs, though this is considered, by some, to be archaic.

Non-diacritic usage

Ukrainian has a letter ï, which is not an i-umlaut, but a separate letter in their alphabet.

Among the Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian have long used ash (æ, actually a ligature) and o-slash (ø), but have more recently incorporated a-ring (å) after Swedish example. Historically the å has developed from a ligature by writing a small a on top of the letter a.

Swedish uses characters identical to a-diaeresis (ä) and o-diaeresis (ö) in the place of ash and o-slash in additon to the a-circle (å). Historically the diaresis for the Swedish letters ä and ö, like the German umlaut, has developed from a small gothic e written on top of the letters.
— Note that North Germanic languages do not use grammatical umlauts.

Finnish uses dotted vowels (ä and ö) similar to in Swedish, and "Å", "Š" and "Ž" in foreign names and loanwords.

German uses umlaut on a (Ä/ä), o (Ö/ö), and u (Ü/ü); that sign origins in a superscript e.

Hungarian uses the acute and double acute accent (unique to Hungarian). The diacritic marks over the letters ö and ü are not umlauts. The acute accent indicates the long form of a vowel, while the double acute performs the same function for ö and ü. Both long and short forms of the vowels are listed separately in the Hungarian alphabet.

In all these cases they are not seen as additional marks over the vowel, but are actually a necessary part of these characters, as they represent entirely different sounds to the basic forms, like also for instance the Estonian "õ".

Abjads and Abugidas

Non-pure abjads (such as Hebrew and Arabic script) and abugidas use diacritics for denoting vowels (not in the list above). Hebrew and Arabic also indicate consonant doubling and change with diacritics; Hebrew and Devanagari use them for foreign sounds.


Alphabetization or collation

Different languages use different rules to put diacritic characters in alphabetical order. French and German treat letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries, but when names are concerned (e.g. in phone books or in author catalogs in libraries), umlauts are often treated as combinations of the vowel with a suffixed 'e'; Austrian phone books now treat umlauts as separate letters (immediately following the underlying letter).

The Scandinavian languages, by contrast, treat the diacritic characters ä, ö and å as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. Usually ä is sorted as equal to æ (ash) and ö is sorted as equal to ø (o-slash). Other diacritically marked letters are treated as variants of the underlying letter.

Other languages treat diacritically marked letters as variants of the underlying letter, but alphabetize them following the unmarked letter. In Spanish ñ is considered a new letter different from n and placed between n and o, however, acute accents and diaeresis are ignored.

The technical term for alphabetization is collation.

See also: Alphabet, Latin alphabet

Generation with Computers

Depending on the keyboard layout, which differs amongst countries, it is more or less easy to enter letters with diacritics on computers and typewriters. Some have their own keys, some are created by first pressing the key with the diacritic mark followed by the letter to place it on. Such a key is sometimes referred to as a dead key, as it produces no output of its own, but modifies the output of the key pressed after it.

On computers with the Microsoft Windows operating system, one can also enter each character of the current codepage, e.g. windows-1252, by holding the Alt key and entering the respective decimal position on the Num pad, e.g. Alt+0210 is Ò.

In modern Microsoft Windows operating systems, the keyboard layout US International allows one to type almost all diacritics directly: "+e gives ë, ~+o gives õ etc.. In addition to this, the layout provides many 'special characters' behind the AltGr modifier: AltGr+t is þ, AltGr+z is æ, etc..

Using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) people using Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 can edit or create any keyboard layout.

On Apple Macintosh computers, there are keyboard shortcuts for the most common diacritics:

  • option-e followed by a vowel: places an acute accent.
  • option-u followed by a vowel: places a diaeresis.
  • option-n followed by a vowel or n: places a tilde.
  • option-` followed by a vowel: places a grave accent.
  • option-i followed by a vowel: places a circumflex.
  • option-c: places a c cedilla

On computers it is also a matter of available codepages, whether you can use certain diacritics. Unicode tries to solve this problem, among others.

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diacritic&oldid=5001321"