Diacritic Explained

A diacritic – also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent – is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: diakritikós, "distinguishing"), from Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: διακρίνω (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: diakrī́nō, "to distinguish"). Diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute (&thinsp;´&thinsp;) and grave (&thinsp;`&thinsp;), are often called accents. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.

The main use of diacritical marks in the Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Examples are the diaereses in the borrowed French words French: naïve and French: Noël, which show that the vowel with the diaeresis mark is pronounced separately from the preceding vowel; the acute and grave accents, which can indicate that a final vowel is to be pronounced, as in saké and poetic breathèd; and the cedilla under the "c" in the borrowed French word French: façade, which shows it is pronounced pronounced as /link/ rather than pronounced as /link/. In other Latin-script alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French French: ("there") versus French: la ("the") that are both pronounced pronounced as //la//. In Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question.

In other alphabetic systems, diacritical marks may perform other functions. Vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat (&thinsp;Arabic: ـِ&nbsp;,ـُ&nbsp;,ـَ, etc.) and the Hebrew niqqud (&thinsp;Hebrew: ַ◌, ֶ◌, ִ◌, ֹ◌, ֻ◌, etc.) systems, indicate vowels that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama (&thinsp;् etc.) and the Arabic sukūn (&thinsp;Arabic: ـْـ|rtl=yes&thinsp;) mark the absence of vowels. Cantillation marks indicate prosody. Other uses include the Early Cyrillic titlo stroke (&thinsp;◌҃&thinsp;) and the Hebrew gershayim (&thinsp;Hebrew: ״|rtl=yes&thinsp;), which, respectively, mark abbreviations or acronyms, and Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals. In the Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Chinese, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur.









Diacritics specific to non-Latin alphabets






The diacritics >〮 and  , known as Bangjeom (Korean: 방점;傍點), were used to mark pitch accents in Hangul for Middle Korean. They were written to the left of a syllable in vertical writing and above a syllable in horizontal writing.




Non-alphabetic scripts


Alphabetization or collation

See main article: article and Collation. Different languages use different rules to put diacritic characters in alphabetical order. French treats letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries.

The Scandinavian languages and the Finnish language, by contrast, treat the characters with diacritics å, ä, and ö as distinct letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. Usually ä (a-umlaut) and ö (o-umlaut) [used in Swedish and Finnish] are sorted as equivalent to æ (ash) and ø (o-slash) [used in Danish and Norwegian]. Also, aa, when used as an alternative spelling to å, is sorted as such. Other letters modified by diacritics are treated as variants of the underlying letter, with the exception that ü is frequently sorted as y.




Generation with computers



In modern Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, the keyboard layouts US International and UK International feature dead keys that allow one to type Latin letters with the acute, grave, circumflex, diaeresis, tilde, and cedilla found in Western European languages (specifically, those combinations found in the ISO Latin-1 character set) directly: + gives ë, + gives õ, etc. On Apple Macintosh computers, there are keyboard shortcuts for the most common diacritics; followed by a vowel places an acute accent, followed by a vowel gives an umlaut, gives a cedilla, etc. Diacritics can be composed in most X Window System keyboard layouts, as well as other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, using additional software.

On computers, the availability of code pages determines whether one can use certain diacritics. Unicode solves this problem by assigning every known character its own code; if this code is known, most modern computer systems provide a method to input it. With Unicode, it is also possible to combine diacritical marks with most characters. However, as of 2019, very few fonts include the necessary support to correctly render character-plus-diacritic(s) for the Latin, Cyrillic and some other alphabets (exceptions include Andika).

Languages with letters containing diacritics


Cyrillic alphabets

Diacritics that do not produce new letters


See main article: article and English terms with diacritical marks. English is one of the few European languages that does not have many words that contain diacritical marks. Instead, digraphs are the main way the Modern English alphabet adapts the Latin to its phonemes. Exceptions are unassimilated foreign loanwords, including borrowings from French and, increasingly, Spanish like jalapeño; however, the diacritic is also sometimes omitted from such words. Loanwords that frequently appear with the diacritic in English include café, résumé or resumé (a usage that helps distinguish it from the verb resume), soufflé, and naïveté (see English terms with diacritical marks). In older practice (and even among some orthographically conservative modern writers) one may see examples such as élite, mêlée and rôle.





Other languages






Possibly the greatest number of combining diacritics required to compose a valid character in any Unicode language is 8, for the "well-known grapheme cluster in Tibetan and Ranjana scripts",ཧྐྵྨླྺྼྻྂ, or HAKṢHMALAWARAYAṀ.[13]

It is U+0F67 U+0F90 U+0FB5 U+0FA8 U+0FB3 U+0FBA U+0FBC U+0FBB U+0F82, or:


Some users have explored the limits of rendering in web browsers and other software by "decorating" words with multiple nonsensical diacritics per character. The result is called "Zalgo text". The composed bogus characters and words can be copied and pasted normally via the system clipboard.

Example: c̳̻͚̻̩̻͉̯̄̏͑̋͆̎͐ͬ͑͌́͢h̵͔͈͍͇̪̯͇̞͖͇̜͉̪̪̤̙ͧͣ̓̐̓ͤ͋͒ͥ͑̆͒̓͋̑́͞ǎ̡̮̤̤̬͚̝͙̞͎̇ͧ͆͊ͅo̴̲̺͓̖͖͉̜̟̗̮̳͉̻͉̫̯̫̍̋̿̒͌̃̂͊̏̈̏̿ͧ́ͬ̌ͥ̇̓̀͢͜s̵̵̘̹̜̝̘̺̙̻̠̱͚̤͓͚̠͙̝͕͆̿̽ͥ̃͠͡

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. As an example, an article containing a diaeresis in "coöperate" and a cedilla in "façades" as well as a circumflex in the word "crêpe" (Anthony . Grafton . Books: The Nutty Professors, The history of academic charisma . 2006-10-23. The New Yorker.)
  2. Web site: The New Yorker's odd mark — the diaeresis. https://web.archive.org/web/20101216160024/http://dscriber.com/news/121-the-new-yorkers-odd-mark-the-diaeresis. dead. 16 December 2010. 16 December 2010.
  4. Oxford English Dictionary
  5. [Eberhard Nestle|Nestle, Eberhard]
  7. Michaelis, Ioannis Davidis (1784). Grammatica Syriaca.
  8. Book: Gramática de la Llingua Asturiana . 2011-06-07 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110525120027/http://www.academiadelallingua.com/diccionariu/gramatica_llingua.pdf . 2011-05-25 . Academia de la Llingua Asturiana . 3rd . 2001 . 84-8168-310-8 . section 1.2.
  11. Web site: Norris. Mary. The Curse of the Diaeresis. The New Yorker. 18 April 2014.
  12. Book: van Geloven, Sander. Diakritische tekens in het Nederlands. Utrecht. Hellebaard. 2012. nl. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20131029192341/http://hellebaard.nl/publicaties/poster/poster-diakritische-tekens-in-het-nederlands-4-stuks/. 2013-10-29.
  13. Web site: Most combining characters in a Unicode glyph/character/whatever. 2010-01-25. 2019-11-25. Steele. Shawn. https://web.archive.org/web/20190516190627/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnste/2010/01/25/most-combining-characters-in-a-unicode-glyphcharacterwhatever/. 2019-05-16. live. Microsoft.