Essential Information & explanations, latest texts & monographs on
Diacritic.
Diacritics and special characters by OCLC
De stungna runorna : användning och ljudvärden i runsvenska steninskrifter by Svante Lagman
Diacritics and special characters by OCLC Online Computer Library Center
Diacritic
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.
Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide")
1 Types
2 Usage
3 Non-diacritic usage
4 Alphabetization
5 Generation with Computers
6 External Links
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)
German uses umlaut on a (Ä/ä), o (Ö/ö), and u (Ü/ü).
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.
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.
Portuguese uses acute, grave, circumflex, cedilla, diaeresis and tilde.
Catalan has grave, acute, cedilla and diaeresis.
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 has Breve
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 still uses diacritics, but only in foreign and loan-words with the exception of è which is used to modify the pronunciation of words ending in -ed within poetry and songs.
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.
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".
Alphabetization
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.
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.
See also: 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.
External Links
The above article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Recent related patents from USPTO:
6646573: Reduced keyboard text input system for the Japanese language
6636162: Reduced keyboard text input system for the Japanese language
6631501: Method and system for automatic type and replace of characters in a sequence of characters
6507813: System and method for national language support
6496793: System and methods for national language support with embedded locale-specific language driver identifiers
6424983: Spelling and grammar checking system
6381616: System and method for speeding up heterogeneous data access using predicate conversion
6326953: Method for converting text corresponding to one keyboard mode to text corresponding to another keyboard mode
6307549: Reduced keyboard disambiguating system
6307548: Reduced keyboard disambiguating system
6286064: Reduced keyboard and method for simultaneous ambiguous and unambiguous text input
6272495: Method and apparatus for processing free-format data
6160536: Dwell time indication method and apparatus
6148227: Diagnosis apparatus for the picture providing recording of fluorescing biological tissue regions
6108627: Automatic transcription tool
6084576: User friendly keyboard
6073146: System and method for processing chinese language text
6047300: System and method for automatically correcting a misspelled word
6014615: System and method for processing morphological and syntactical analyses of inputted Chinese language phrases
6011554: Reduced keyboard disambiguating system
6005549: User interface method and apparatus
5999895: Sound operated menu method and apparatus
5953541: Disambiguating system for disambiguating ambiguous input sequences by displaying objects associated with the generated input sequences in the order of decreasing frequency of use
5933525: Language-independent and segmentation-free optical character recognition system and method
5893133: Keyboard for a system and method for processing Chinese language text
5873111: Method and system for collation in a processing system of a variety of distinct sets of information
5832478: Method of searching an on-line dictionary using syllables and syllable count
5802482: System and method for processing graphic language characters
5787452: Client/server database system with methods for multi-threaded data processing in a heterogeneous language environment
5784071: Context-based code convertor
5758314: Client/server database system with methods for improved soundex processing in a heterogeneous language environment
5696980: Machine translation system utilizing bilingual equivalence statements
5682488: Variable computer icon for single control of complex software functions executed on a data processing system
5678039: System and methods for translating software into localized versions
5675818: System and methods for improved sorting with national language support
5634124: Data integration by object management
5623593: System and method for automatically spacing characters
5526477: System and method for generating glyphs of unknown characters
5421015: Multitasking system having an application integration mechanism for linking differently typed data objects
5421012: Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types
5416898: Apparatus and method for generating textual lines layouts
5387042: Multilingual keyboard system
5369778: Data processor that customizes program behavior by using a resource retrieval capability
5303379: Link mechanism for linking data between objects and for performing operations on the linked data in an object based system
5261080: Matchmaker for assisting and executing the providing and conversion of data between objects in a data processing system storing data in typed objects having different data formats
5231581: Method for culturally predictable key sort within a national language support (NLS) data processing system
5226161: Integration of data between typed data structures by mutual direct invocation between data managers corresponding to data types
5225833: Character encoding
5206951: Integration of data between typed objects by mutual, direct invocation between object managers corresponding to object types
Bibliographic Resources
Updates and comments at Essential Facts blog
Are you interested in Feng Shui?
Price Theory Resources
World Class Photographers
Some philosophical movements
Top PDF and eBook Downloads
|
|
Interesting Links
Sports
Kitchen Knowledge
Hollywood Icons
Mythology
Philosophy
Politics
Retirement
Accounting & Finance
Automobiles
Marketing
Psychology
Academic Subjects
Ancient Greeks
Art & Design
Biology
Biology & Biologists
California
Cats & Dogs
Ethics
Legal Topics
Logic
The Greats
Architectural Dates & Places
* Mathematics & Mathematicians
Medical Update d06
More
Chromosomes and Genomics
Enginering Systems 1
Investments
Transportation
Mathematics
Brilliant Mathematicians
Classic Authors
Fear No Exams
Nexus
Characters & countries
Computers + 2
Science Plus
Science & Computers
Quantum Theory
Home, Site-Map
|