Explanation of diacritical marks and accents
Accompaniment to Super duper code chart.
What are diacritical marks and accents?
A diacritic—or diacritical mark or accent—is a glyph added to a letter. 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. Other times in Latin-script alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là (“there”) versus la (“the”) that are both pronounced /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. In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new, distinct letter or as a letter–diacritic combination. This varies from language to language and may vary from case to case within a language. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis may be used in words such as “coöperation”).
Accute accent
The acute accent (´) is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. The acute accent generally marks the stressed vowel of a word. In English, a number of (usually French) loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language (attaché, blasé, cliché, café, etc.). Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none). Also, acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final ‘e’ is not silent, for example, maté from Spanish mate, and saké and Pokémon from the Japanese. For foreign terms used in English that have not been assimilated into English or are not in general English usage, italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d’état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée, and ancien régime.
Cedilla
A cedilla is a hook or tail added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese, it is used only under the ‘c’ and the entire letter is called respectively c trencada (i.e. “broken C”), c cédille, and c cedilhado. The most frequent character with cedilla is ‘ç’ (‘c’ with cedilla, as in façade). It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter ‘z’ (ꝣ), whose upper loop was lengthened and reinterpreted as a ‘c’, while its lower loop became the diminished appendage, the cedilla. It represents the “soft” sound /s/, the voiceless alveolar sibilant, where a ‘c’ would normally represent the “hard” sound /k/.
Circumflex
The circumflex (^) is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. In English the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example, crème brûlée). The diacritic is also used in mathematics, where it is typically called a hat or roof or house. The circumflex has its origins in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek where it marked long vowels that were pronounced with high and then falling pitch. In a similar vein, the circumflex is today used to mark tone contour in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The shape of the circumflex was originally a combination of the acute and grave accents (^), as it marked a syllable contracted from two vowels: an acute-accented vowel and a non-accented vowel.
Double acute accent
The double acute accent (˝) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian and consequently sometimes referred to by typographers as Hungarumlaut. Letters with the double acute are considered variants of their equivalents with the umlaut, being thought of as having both an umlaut and an acute accent.
Eszett or “sharp s”
The eszett or “sharp s” (ß) in German orthography represents the [s] phoneme in Standard German, specifically when following long vowels and diphthongs, while “ss” is used after short vowels. The name “eszett” combines the names of the letters of ‘s’ and ‘z’ in German. The grapheme has an intermediate position between letter and ligature. It behaves as a ligature in that it has no separate position in the alphabet.
Grave accent
The grave accent (`) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in English, French, Dutch, Italian, and many other western European languages. The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography. The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /lʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkɪd/. In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /lɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnɪd/ (for example, “a very learnèd man”). A grave accent can also occur in a foreign (usually French) term which has not been anglicised: for example, vis-à-vis, pièce de résistance or crème brûlée. It also may occur in an English name, often as an affectation, as for example in the case of Albert Ketèlbey.
Lenition
Lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word lenition itself means “softening” or “weakening” (from Latin lenis “weak”). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like ‘h’, or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. An example of synchronic lenition in American English is found in “flapping” in some dialects, a specific example being the word butter which is often heard as “budder”.
Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ (spelling et, from the Latin for “and”) were combined. Historically, ligatures developed as a way to speed up written communication, and sometimes letters were conjoined for aesthetic purposes. Modern font programming divides ligatures into three groups: standard, contextual and historical. Standard ligatures are needed to allow the font to display without errors such as character collision. Publishers sometimes find contextual and historic ligatures desirable for creating effects or to evoke an old-fashioned print look.
Macron
A macron is a diacritical mark shown as a straight bar (¯) above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) “long” since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone. The macron’s opposite is the breve (˘), which marks a short or light syllable or a short vowel. Transcriptions of Arabic typically use macrons to indicate long vowels. In Old English texts a macron above a letter indicates the omission of an m or n that would normally follow that letter.
Overring
The overring represents a grapheme which identifies a vowel shift. For example, in the Czech language, the word for “horse” used to be kuoň. Ultimately, the vowel ‘o’ disappeared and the ‘uo’ evolved into ‘ů’. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú (long [uː]) but changes to a short ‘o’ when a word is morphed, thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Also, the letter ‘a’ with overring stands for the ångström, a unit of measure of length.
Slash
The ‘O’ with slash (Ø) is used as a representation of a mid front rounded vowel. Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a “slashed o” or “o with stroke.” Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o, it is considered a separate letter in Norwegian and Danish, and it is alphabetized after ‘z’—thus z, æ, ø, and å. It possibly arose as a version of the ligature ‘Œ’ of the digraph “oe” with the horizontal line of the ‘e’ written across the ‘o’. It possibly arose in Anglo-Saxon England as an ‘O’ and an ‘I’ written in the same place.
Tilde
The tilde (˜) is a grapheme with several uses. It was originally written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a “mark of suspension.” Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe’s labour and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full. The tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. This symbol in US English informally means “approximately,” “about,” or “around.” It can also mean “similar to.”
Umlaut/diaeresis/tréma
The diaeresis (or tréma) and the umlaut are two homoglyphic diacritical marks that consist of two dots (¨) placed over a letter, usually a vowel. When that letter is an ‘i’ or a ‘j’ the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï. The diaeresis and the umlaut mark two distinct phonological phenomena. The diaeresis represents the phenomenon known as diaeresis or hiatus in which a vowel letter is pronounced separately from an adjacent vowel and not as part of a digraph or diphthong. The umlaut, in contrast, indicates a sound shift. Germanic umlaut is a specific historical phenomenon of vowel-fronting in German and other Germanic languages, causing back vowels to shift forward in the mouth.
What are diacritical marks and accents?
A diacritic—or diacritical mark or accent—is a glyph added to a letter. 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. Other times in Latin-script alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là (“there”) versus la (“the”) that are both pronounced /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. In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new, distinct letter or as a letter–diacritic combination. This varies from language to language and may vary from case to case within a language. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis may be used in words such as “coöperation”).
Accute accent
The acute accent (´) is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. The acute accent generally marks the stressed vowel of a word. In English, a number of (usually French) loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language (attaché, blasé, cliché, café, etc.). Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none). Also, acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final ‘e’ is not silent, for example, maté from Spanish mate, and saké and Pokémon from the Japanese. For foreign terms used in English that have not been assimilated into English or are not in general English usage, italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d’état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée, and ancien régime.
Cedilla
A cedilla is a hook or tail added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese, it is used only under the ‘c’ and the entire letter is called respectively c trencada (i.e. “broken C”), c cédille, and c cedilhado. The most frequent character with cedilla is ‘ç’ (‘c’ with cedilla, as in façade). It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter ‘z’ (ꝣ), whose upper loop was lengthened and reinterpreted as a ‘c’, while its lower loop became the diminished appendage, the cedilla. It represents the “soft” sound /s/, the voiceless alveolar sibilant, where a ‘c’ would normally represent the “hard” sound /k/.
Circumflex
The circumflex (^) is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. In English the circumflex, like other diacritics, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language (for example, crème brûlée). The diacritic is also used in mathematics, where it is typically called a hat or roof or house. The circumflex has its origins in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek where it marked long vowels that were pronounced with high and then falling pitch. In a similar vein, the circumflex is today used to mark tone contour in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The shape of the circumflex was originally a combination of the acute and grave accents (^), as it marked a syllable contracted from two vowels: an acute-accented vowel and a non-accented vowel.
Double acute accent
The double acute accent (˝) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian and consequently sometimes referred to by typographers as Hungarumlaut. Letters with the double acute are considered variants of their equivalents with the umlaut, being thought of as having both an umlaut and an acute accent.
Eszett or “sharp s”
The eszett or “sharp s” (ß) in German orthography represents the [s] phoneme in Standard German, specifically when following long vowels and diphthongs, while “ss” is used after short vowels. The name “eszett” combines the names of the letters of ‘s’ and ‘z’ in German. The grapheme has an intermediate position between letter and ligature. It behaves as a ligature in that it has no separate position in the alphabet.
Grave accent
The grave accent (`) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in English, French, Dutch, Italian, and many other western European languages. The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography. The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /lʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkɪd/. In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /lɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnɪd/ (for example, “a very learnèd man”). A grave accent can also occur in a foreign (usually French) term which has not been anglicised: for example, vis-à-vis, pièce de résistance or crème brûlée. It also may occur in an English name, often as an affectation, as for example in the case of Albert Ketèlbey.
Lenition
Lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word lenition itself means “softening” or “weakening” (from Latin lenis “weak”). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a particular point in time) and diachronically (as a language changes over time). Lenition can involve such changes as voicing a voiceless consonant, causing a consonant to relax occlusion, to lose its place of articulation (a phenomenon called debuccalization, which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like ‘h’, or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. An example of synchronic lenition in American English is found in “flapping” in some dialects, a specific example being the word butter which is often heard as “budder”.
Ligature
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ (spelling et, from the Latin for “and”) were combined. Historically, ligatures developed as a way to speed up written communication, and sometimes letters were conjoined for aesthetic purposes. Modern font programming divides ligatures into three groups: standard, contextual and historical. Standard ligatures are needed to allow the font to display without errors such as character collision. Publishers sometimes find contextual and historic ligatures desirable for creating effects or to evoke an old-fashioned print look.
Macron
A macron is a diacritical mark shown as a straight bar (¯) above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) “long” since it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet the macron is used to indicate a mid-tone. The macron’s opposite is the breve (˘), which marks a short or light syllable or a short vowel. Transcriptions of Arabic typically use macrons to indicate long vowels. In Old English texts a macron above a letter indicates the omission of an m or n that would normally follow that letter.
Overring
The overring represents a grapheme which identifies a vowel shift. For example, in the Czech language, the word for “horse” used to be kuoň. Ultimately, the vowel ‘o’ disappeared and the ‘uo’ evolved into ‘ů’. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú (long [uː]) but changes to a short ‘o’ when a word is morphed, thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Also, the letter ‘a’ with overring stands for the ångström, a unit of measure of length.
Slash
The ‘O’ with slash (Ø) is used as a representation of a mid front rounded vowel. Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a “slashed o” or “o with stroke.” Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o, it is considered a separate letter in Norwegian and Danish, and it is alphabetized after ‘z’—thus z, æ, ø, and å. It possibly arose as a version of the ligature ‘Œ’ of the digraph “oe” with the horizontal line of the ‘e’ written across the ‘o’. It possibly arose in Anglo-Saxon England as an ‘O’ and an ‘I’ written in the same place.
Tilde
The tilde (˜) is a grapheme with several uses. It was originally written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a “mark of suspension.” Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe’s labour and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full. The tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. This symbol in US English informally means “approximately,” “about,” or “around.” It can also mean “similar to.”
Umlaut/diaeresis/tréma
The diaeresis (or tréma) and the umlaut are two homoglyphic diacritical marks that consist of two dots (¨) placed over a letter, usually a vowel. When that letter is an ‘i’ or a ‘j’ the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï. The diaeresis and the umlaut mark two distinct phonological phenomena. The diaeresis represents the phenomenon known as diaeresis or hiatus in which a vowel letter is pronounced separately from an adjacent vowel and not as part of a digraph or diphthong. The umlaut, in contrast, indicates a sound shift. Germanic umlaut is a specific historical phenomenon of vowel-fronting in German and other Germanic languages, causing back vowels to shift forward in the mouth.