Diacritic
A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter.
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2 Usage 3 Generation with Computers 4 External Links |
Some common types of diacritical marks:
Marks that are sometimes diacritics, but also have other uses, are:
Grave, acute, circumflex, cedilla and diaeresis are used in French. However, not all diacritics occur on all vowels in French:
Types
¹/ Strictly taken not diacritics but parts of the character.Usage
Umlaut is used in German on a (Ä/ä), o (Ö/ö), and u (Ü/ü).
Diaeresis is used in Dutch. 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.
Among the Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian use ash (æ, actually a ligature), o-slash (ø) and a-ring or a-angstrom (å). Swedish uses a-umlaut (ä) and o-umlaut (ö) in the place of ash and o-slash, but also uses a-circle (å).
Acute, diaeresis and tilde are used in Spanish. 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.
Acute, grave, circumflex, cedilla, diaeresis and tilde are used in Portuguese.
Grave, acute, cedilla and diaeresis are used in Catalan.
Acute, diaeresis, and double acute accent are used in Hungarian.
Caron is used in many Slavic and the Baltic languages to signify either palatalisation or iotation.
Breve and circumflex are used in Esperanto
Umlaut, used only on u (ü), in Chinese Romanizations.
Acute (Sắc), grave (Huyền), tilde (Ngã), dot below (Nặng) and Hỏi are used in Vietnamese, which combines up to three of them with a single letter.
Modern English still uses diacritics, but only in foreign and loan-words.
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 in German phone books the umlauts are treated as combinations of the vowel with a suffixed 'e'. The Scandinavian languages, by contrast, treat the diacritics as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. 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). Arabic also uses diacritical marks to distinguish between different consonants, e.g. ب = b, and ت = t.
See also: Alphabet
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.
On computers it's also a matter of available codepages, whether you can use certain diacritics. Unicode tries to solve this problem, among others.
On Macintosh computers, there are keyboard shortcuts for the most common diacritics:
Generation with Computers
On Windows computers one can 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.
