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• Diacritical Characters
• See Full List On Pinyin.info
• List Of English Diacritical Marks

Chris Harvey © 2009

Contents

Practical Solutions to Diacritic Problems (off-page)
The Relation between Sounds and Letters
Why Diacritics?
Diacritics and Fonts
Typing diacritics
The Names of the Diacritics

The Relation between Sounds and Letters

The modern Latin script (as used by English, French, Spanish, etc.) has twenty-six letters: A–Z. This means that any language which has more than twenty-six sounds (phonemes) must modify the alphabet in some way to accommodate the full range of phonemes. Similarly, some strategy to change the alphabet is required if the language uses sounds which were absent from the original Latin.

It is generally understood that each letter of the Latin A–Z has some kind of inherent sound, or group of sounds, which writing systems should follow. For example, the letter e is inherently a vowel sound, which is pronounced somewhere at the front of the mouth. The letter b is a consonant involving the coming together in some way of both lips, while t is a consonant using the tongue-tip near the front of the mouth. If twenty people speaking twenty different languages which use the Latin script saw the word bet, we can assume that most would all pronounce it with something close to the same sound.

Due to historical reasons, some languages diverge from the inherent sounds of the Latin script more than others. English has undergone some major vowel changes, which result in the letter u, for example, being pronounced in a rather unusual way when short [ʌ]. In other cases, languages which have recently begun to use the Latin script have matched sounds and letters in atypical ways: e.g. Pinyin Chinese q pronounced close to English “ch” [tɕ]. And some letters, like c or x represent a wide variety of phonemes in different writing systems (orthographies). Generally speaking, though, q is still a consonant and u is still a vowel. The consonants c, j, q, and x are among the letters most commonly re-assigned, as their Latin pronunciation values are often superfluous: they could be replaced with k, y, kw, and ks respectively.

How then, can a language’s Latin-script orthography write sounds that didn’t exist in Latin? As mentioned in the previous paragraph, one could assign novel sound values to letters. Many languages do this to some small degree, but too many changes make knowledge of the script difficult to transfer to other languages:

• English: j[dʒ],long-i[ɑɩ], long-a[eɩ] and a few other vowel sounds.
• Welsh: y[ə],u[ɨ]/[i]
• Hungarian: c[ts],s[ʃ]
• Kiowa (McKenzie Orthography): f[p],j[t],v[p’],x[tʃ’],q[k’]

A second strategy is to combine letters of the Latin script together to represent unique phonemes. Some writing systems use a punctuation mark or accent to separate letter combinations: the mid-dot (l·l) in Catalan, the apostrophe (n’g) in Inuktitut, the underline (en) in Mohawk. Many orthographies do not have consistent ways to separate these types of combinations. While a very popular way to extend the alphabet, this technique runs into problems where a two or more of charaters could be pronounced multiple ways: either as a single sound or a series of sounds, for example: English sh in fishing[ʃ] and mishap[sh].

• English: ch[tʃ], sh[ʃ], th[θ]/[ð], ee[i],igh[ɑɩ] and so on
• Welsh: ch[x],dd[ð], ll [ɬ], rh [r̥],th[θ], and so on
• Hungarian: cs[tʃ],dzs[dʒ], gy [ɟ], ly [j],sz[s], and so on
• Kiowa (McKenzie Orthography): ch[tʃ],th[t’],au[ɔ]

Yet another method is to introduce completely new or modified letters to the Latin scripts. This is relatively uncommon in orthographies which have been in use for many centuries, however, newly developed spelling systems often contain characters borrowed from various phonetic alphabets:

• Icelandic: ð[θ]/[ð], þ[θ]/[ð]
• Polish, Dene languages: ł[w] in Polish, [ɬ] in Dene
• Halkomelem (Musqueam): ʔ[ʔ],ƛ[tɬ],ə[ə],ɬ[ɬ],χ[χ]
• Ktunaxa: ȼ[ts],ⱡ[ɬ],ʔ[ʔ]

Why Diacritics?

Diacrics, often called accents, are the final way to extend the alphabet that I will discuss. Cross-linguistically this is probably the most popular means (along with letter combinations) to spell out sounds lacking in Latin, though it is not at all common in English.

• Swedish: ä[ɛ], ö[ø], å[o]
• Uummarmiutun Inuvialuktun: ñ[ɲ], r̂ [ɹ]

Diacritics are especially effective as they allow readers to see associations between sets of sounds. Typically a diacritic indicates that the base letter has been modified in some predictable way.

• Welsh: a[a],â[a:], e[ɛ],ê[e:] the circumflex accent indicates a long vowel in an unexpected place.
• Italian: a[a],à['a], e[ɛ],è['e] the grave accent indicates an unusually stressed vowel.
• Nisga’a: m [m], m̓ [m̰], n [n], n̓ [n̰] the apostrophe accent indicates a glottalised consonant. g̱ [ɢ], ḵ [q], x̱ [χ] the low-macron accent indicates a uvular consonant.
• Tłįchǫ Yatiì: a[a],à[a+low tone],e[e],è[e+low tone] the grave accent indicates low tone. a[a]ą[ã],e[e]ę[ẽ], the ogonek accent indicates a nasal vowel.

By using diacritical marks, the relationships between sounds and sound changes are not confused by the addition of new characters. In Mohawk, a vowel can carry three different stress/tones: unstressed (no diacritic), high tone stressed (acúte accent), falling tone stressed (gràve accent). When suffixes are added, stress usually shifts towards the end of the word, meaning what was once a stressed vowel becomes unstressed: oháha ‘road’ > ohahákta ‘beside the road’. The change in stress is shown by the accent leaving the base characters unchanged. An asterisk * before a word means that *itz form is incorrect.If, hypothetically, Mohawk indicated stressed vowels with a new symbol (such as §), the spelling of the root word would no longer be consistent: *oh§ha ‘road’ > *ohah§kta ‘beside the road’.

Remembering the correct usage of diaritics can be difficult at first for people who are only familiar with English spelling (which uses accent marks sparingly if at all), and there is often an initial distaste towards these marks. Even the ancient Romans used an accent mark in Latin: called an apex However diacritics are an integral part of most Latin-based orthographies on earth and give a writing system its character and aesthetic: what would French be without é or ç, Spanish without ñ, or Navajo without ę́?

Diacritics and Fonts

It was a fact of life on early computers that most languages could not be displayed properly because the ASCII character set did not contain any accented characters whatsoever. In 1985, the ISO 8859-1 (often called Latin-1) character set was released including a number of pre-composed accented characters for major western European languages, though French and Finnish could not be written correctly as the characters œ, š, and ž were absent. Proper quotation marks were also lacking.

To display the major central Eurpean languages, one had to install special CE fonts, which would re-arrange the character map, removing western European accented characters and replacing them with those needed for Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, etc. There were similar re-encodings for Baltic Languages (Latin-4), Turkish (Latin-5), and many more. Users of each encoding needed to install special fonts. If one wanted to view Lithuanian, for example, one would need a font based on Latin-4, the language could not be read with a Latin-1 font.

Some encodings were standardised; generally these were all in Europe. For speakers of indigenous languages without their own encodings, speakers had to resort to home-made, ad-hoc fonts with idiosyncratic character mapping. If you have ever used ‘Times Navajo’, ‘WinMac’ (for NWT Dene languages), or the Cherokee Nation’s ‘Cherokee’, you are familiar with ad-hoc fonts.

While the myriad different encodings—some standard, some not—enabled one to print out hard copies in many languages, with the arrival of the internet and e-mail, a serious flaw emerged. Here are some commonly encountered situations, even today:

• You want to send me an e-mail in your language which has diacritics which do not exist in Latin-1. You either leave out diacritics altogether, or use type-fudges. For example, the word Tŝilhqot’in would be typed either *Tsilhqot'in or *Ts^ilhqot'in. These fudges amount to spelling mistakes.
• Ndè Naàwo is an example of a Tłi̧cho̧ Yatiì language website using an ad-hoc font. Assuming you don’t have the font installed, the text appears full of diaereses, circumflexts, æ’s, and å’s, none of which belong in the orthography.You want to create a web-page in your Native language, which contains diacritics when written. You include a link to download an ad-hoc font which will allow me, the reader, to make sense of the page. Chances are, I don’t want to download and install software just to read your page, so I click off somewhere else. Without the font, the text is garbled and illegible. Or you have to upload everything as a PDF.
• In desparation, the local language authority replaces the orthography with a new system devoid of special characters or diacritics. While this solves some technical problems, it is an example of people serving the machine, instead of the machine serving the people.

Diacritical Characters

Here I will start to distinguish a character from a letter. A letter is a unit of orthography: in many languages combinations like lh or t’ are considered one letter. A character is a unit of computers: the smallest unit of type as the computer understands it. A base letter is a character, a combining diacritic is another character, and something like lh is two characters, irrespective of how it is used in specific languages. With the release of Unicode, and Unicode support becoming standard on all modern computers, the days of requiring ad-hoc fonts had come to an end. Unicode introduced the combining diacritic, a character consisting of a floating accent mark which binds to the preceding character. So that r̂ is made up of two characters: r +combining circumflex. With a broad selection of combining accents to choose from, virtually any base-letter diacritic combination is possible. There are several complicating factors:

• Not all fonts contain the combining diacritic characters. The system fonts, like Times New Roman or Helvetica do have these diacritics, as do the fonts from Languagegeek.
• Even when the combining diacritics are present in the font, often the font’s designer did not include instructions on how to properly place those diacritics above or below the base characters. In this case, the diacritic will appear too high or not high enough, or too far to the left or right. Languagegeek fonts include instructions for diacritic placement for North American Native languages, and many other languages using the Latin Script around the world.
• Unicode characters are usually referenced by number, U+0058 is capital X and U+0142 is lowercase slash-l ł. Unicode characters also have official names, which are typically given in all-caps. The designers of Unicode did not want to make documents using earlier encodings—like Latin-1, Latin-2, etc.—obsolete. The precomposed accented characters found in other encodings: like ä or î, had to be included in Unicode as precomposed in addition to building these by base character + combining diacritic. Therefore, a letter like ä can be either a precomposed character: U+00E4, or a base character (a) followed by the combining diacritic (diaeresis) U+0061 U+0308. Both versions of ä should be treated as identical on computers, but not all software is in compliance yet.

In the end, it is my advice that everyone should be using Unicode encodings and fonts as Unicode is the global standard which allows all languages to work within the same system no matter whether one is using Windows, Mac, Linux, or whatever. The Languagegeek fonts were specially designed to use combining diacritics to write any indigenous language.

Typing Diacritics

Unicode fonts allow one to read the language, typing it another matter. The computers used by most Native language speakers around the world come with a keyboard for the dominant language of that country. In some cases, this is not a problem, for example: Quechua can be typed on a Spanish keyboard, or Abenaki on a Canadian French keyboard. However, a great many indigenous languages use letters which are not accessible on the Native speakers’ computers’ keyboards.

• The best solution is to use a keyboard layout specifically designed for your language. If your computer does not have such a keyboard already, please download and install a Languagegeek keyboard layout which will allow you to quickly and easily type all the characters you need.
• The standard keyboard layouts on Macs can type certain diacritic marks by using the option key. This method does not meet the needs of most Native languages, and is not the most efficient way to type. Windows has a similar kind of keyboard called US International.
• You can open the Character Palette or Character Map, and find-and-click the characters you need. This is a reasonable solution if you only need to add one or two characters to your document, but for any amount of typing in the Native language, this technique is frustrating.

The Names of the Diacritics

Each diacritical mark has a name. Different languages often have different words for accents they use, and in a few cases, different accent names can be used when the same mark has different functions. Often speakers of indigenous languages come up with their own words to describe the diacritics, both in the Native language and in English. These words usually refer to either how the mark affects pronunciation or what it looks like on the page. The háček accent (the down-pointing arrow on top of the č pronounced: HA-check) is often called a ‘wedge’, and many people call the circumflex (the up-pointing arrow on top of â) a ‘hat’. Some descriptors by pronunciation are: the acute accent (as in é) can be called ‘high tone’ or ‘stress accent’ (depending on the language) and the ogonek accent (as in ą) is often referred to as a ‘nasal hook’.

Below is a list of the most commonly seen diacritics in Native languages, along with their standard English name and Unicode encoding number, followed by some other commonly heard words to describe these accents, and a few Native languages which use this diacritic. The mark is shown with the letter ‘a’ as a demonstration, it does not mean that in the languages given, the diacritic is combined specifically with ‘a’.

A frequently asked question from any aspiring speller is “How do you know the correct pronunciation of a word?” The Merriam-Webster dictionary has a system of pronunciation symbols (also called diacritical marks or diacritics) that will tell you how to pronounce the word. In any dictionary entry, the pronunciation symbols will be right next the spelling of the word.

(You can find a complete list of all Merriam-Webster pronunciation symbols at http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/info/pronsymbols.html ).

Learning all these symbols may be overwhelming for new spellers. In this post, we will break down this list of pronunciation symbols so you will become a master in reading diacritical marks!

Schwa (pronounced /shwä/): ə

One of the most common diacritics is the schwa, which looks like an upside-down e (ə). This is a neutral vowel sound, pronounced like “uh,” as in banana, circus, and collect. This is often the hardest sound for a speller to figure out because it can be spelled with any vowel: a, e, i, o, u, or even y.

Short Vowel Sounds: a, e, i, o, and u

Whenever there is a plain vowel with no marks on it, it is pronounced with a short sound.

Short vowel sounds:

a- “aa” sound as in had or cap

e- “eh” sound as in set or head

i- “ih” sound as in mitten or sip

Macron (pronounced /mā-ˌkrän/): ā, ē, ī, ō

A macron is a straight line ( ⁻ ) that is placed over a vowel. This symbol gives a vowel a long sound.

Long vowel sounds:

ā- “ay” sound as in day

ē- “ee” sound as in bead

ī– “ii” sound as in site

ō- “oh” sound as in snow

Diaeresis (also spelled dieresis, pronounced /dīˈerəsəs/): ä and ü

A diaeresis is two dots (^.) that are placed on top of a vowel. A diaeresis is used when the vowel ‘a’ or ‘u’ are pronounced like they are “stretched out”.

ä- “ah” sound as in bother or cot

ü- “oo” sound as in moose or rule or shoe

In German words, these two dots can also be called an umlaut. An umlaut is used when a German vowel is pronounced like a mix of two vowel sounds. One example is the word kummel, which is pronounced /kiməi/. Notice how the letter ‘u’ in kummel is pronounced like a short ‘i,’ that’s how an umlaut works.

Stress Symbols: ‘ and ,

Ark: survival evolved season pass download free. Stress symbols tell you which syllable of the word has the most stress, or emphasis. If a syllable is stressed, that means you put some extra force or pressure as you say that syllable. Stressed syllables are pronounced slightly louder and longer than unstressed syllables.

See Full List On Pinyin.info

The diacritical mark (‘) indicates primary stress. This means that you put the most stress, or emphasis, on the syllable that comes right after this mark. Beyond a steel sky soundtrack download free.

The diacritical mark (,) indicates secondary stress. This means that the syllable after this sound also has some stress, but it is not as much as the primary stress.

Stress on the word can make all the difference in what it means. For example, the word “present” can have two different meanings depending on where you put the stress.

Additional Symbols:

ŋ- “ng” sound as in sing

au̇- “ow” sound as in out

ȯi- “oy” sound as in boy

Now let’s take a mini-test! Read the pronunciations and try to guess what the word is.

jəˈra f

də-ˈmä-krə-sē

List Of English Diacritical Marks

nash-nəl

By learning how to read pronunciation symbols, you can learn how to correctly pronounce every word in the dictionary, which will help you in spelling bees. With some experience, you will be able to read these pronunciation symbols so quickly that they will become like a second language, and you will be able to practice words faster.

Please send your questions to spellpundit@gmail.com.