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103-475: The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the <oo> letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced /ˈkuːpəreɪt/ . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indicate that

206-690: A back). The complex one is concerned with the high vowels i, ü, ı, u and has both [±front] and [±rounded] features ( i front unrounded vs ü front rounded and ı back unrounded vs u back rounded). The close-mid vowels ö, o are not involved in vowel harmony processes. Turkish has two classes of vowels – front and back . Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels. Therefore, most grammatical suffixes come in front and back forms, e.g. Türkiye' de "in Turkey" but Almanya' da "in Germany". In addition, there

309-518: A diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., "coöperative", "reëlect"), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. "co-operative", "re-elect"). Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨ å ⟩ , ⟨ ä ⟩ , and ⟨ ö ⟩ , may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned

412-652: A lingua franca , but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages , the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets ) or Baltic languages , as well as by

515-460: A tongue root harmony and a rounding harmony. In particular, the tongue root harmony involves the vowels: /a, ʊ, ɔ/ (+RTR) and /i, u, e, o/ (-RTR). The vowel /i/ is phonetically similar to the -RTR vowels. However, it is largely transparent to vowel harmony. Rounding harmony only affects the open vowels, /e, o, a, ɔ/ . Some sources refer to the primary harmonization dimension as pharyngealization or palatalness (among others), but neither of these

618-475: A ⟩ , ⟨ e ⟩ , ⟨ i ⟩ , ⟨ o ⟩ , ⟨ u ⟩ . The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns . The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English , for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of

721-500: A European CEN standard. In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters , by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures , by creating completely new forms, or by assigning

824-619: A diacritic or modified letter. These include exposé , lamé , maté , öre , øre , résumé and rosé. In a few words, diacritics that did not exist in the original have been added for disambiguation, as in maté ( from Sp. and Port. mate) , saké ( the standard Romanization of the Japanese has no accent mark ) , and Malé ( from Dhivehi މާލެ ) , to clearly distinguish them from the English words mate, sake, and male. The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics:

927-405: A few native modern Turkish words that do not follow the rule (such as anne "mother" or kardeş "sibling" which used to obey vowel harmony in their older forms, ana and karındaş , respectively). However, in such words, suffixes nevertheless harmonize with the final vowel; thus annes i – "his/her mother", and voleybolc u – "volleyballer". In some loanwords the final vowel

1030-416: A front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony, which strongly resembles that of Kazakh. Turkish has a 2-dimensional vowel harmony system, where vowels are characterised by two features: [±front] and [±rounded]. There are two sets of vocal harmony systems: a simple one and a complex one. The simple one is concerned with the low vowels e, a and has only the [±front] feature ( e front vs

1133-475: A fully developed system. The one exception is Uzbek , which has lost its vowel harmony due to extensive Persian influence; however, its closest relative, Uyghur , has retained Turkic vowel harmony. Azerbaijani 's system of vowel harmony has both front/back and rounded/unrounded vowels. Tatar has no neutral vowels. The vowel é is found only in loanwords . Other vowels also could be found in loanwords, but they are seen as Back vowels. Tatar language also has

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1236-543: A process termed romanization . Whilst the romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited seven-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode , romanization is now becoming less necessary. Keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available. Vowel harmony In phonology , vowel harmony

1339-700: A proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025. In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated

1442-512: A rounding harmony superimposed over a backness harmony. Even among languages with vowel harmony, not all vowels need to participate in the vowel conversions; these vowels are termed neutral . Neutral vowels may be opaque and block harmonic processes or they may be transparent and not affect them. Intervening consonants are also often transparent. Finally, languages that do have vowel harmony often allow for lexical disharmony , or words with mixed sets of vowels even when an opaque neutral vowel

1545-403: A rounding harmony, but it is not represented in writing. O and ö could be written only in the first syllable, but vowels they mark could be pronounced in the place where ı and e are written. Kazakh 's system of vowel harmony is primarily a front/back system, but there is also a system of rounding harmony that is not represented by the orthography. Kyrgyz 's system of vowel harmony is primarily

1648-458: A single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ ñ ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨ n ⟩ and ⟨ o ⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨ á ⟩ , ⟨ é ⟩ , ⟨ í ⟩ , ⟨ ó ⟩ , ⟨ ú ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨

1751-532: A small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ or the Romanian characters ă , â , î , ș , ț . Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate

1854-470: A special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language. Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , and the letter eth ⟨Ð/ð⟩ , which were added to

1957-504: A specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish . In other cases, such as with ⟨ ä ⟩ , ⟨ ö ⟩ , ⟨ ü ⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within

2060-624: A unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language . On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use. At present

2163-540: A vowel is to be pronounced differently than is normal in that position, for example not reduced to /ə/ or silent as in the case of the two uses of the letter e in the noun résumé (as opposed to the verb resume ) and the help sometimes provided in the pronunciation of some words such as doggèd , learnèd , blessèd , and especially words pronounced differently than normal in poetry (for example movèd , breathèd ). Most other words with diacritics in English are borrowings from languages such as French to better preserve

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2266-413: A way of indicating that adjacent vowels belonged to separate syllables, but this practice has become far less common. The New Yorker magazine is a major publication that continues to use the diaeresis in place of a hyphen for clarity and economy of space. A few English words, often when used out of context, especially in isolation, can only be distinguished from other words of the same spelling by using

2369-446: Is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within

2472-418: Is a secondary rule that i and ı in suffixes tend to become ü and u respectively after rounded vowels, so certain suffixes have additional forms. This gives constructions such as Türkiye' dir "it is Turkey", kapı dır "it is the door", but gün dür "it is the day", karpuz dur "it is the watermelon". Not all suffixes obey vowel harmony perfectly. In the suffix -(i)yor ,

2575-640: Is also used by the Faroese alphabet . Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ , and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ , ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩ . Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives , and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective . Africanists have standardized these into

2678-676: Is an a , o or u and thus looks like a back vowel, but is phonetically actually a front vowel, and governs vowel harmony accordingly. An example is the word saat , meaning "hour" or "clock", a loanword from Arabic. Its plural is sa a tl e r . This is not truly an exception to vowel harmony itself; rather, it is an exception to the rule that a denotes a front vowel. Disharmony tends to disappear through analogy, especially within loanwords; e.g. Hüsnü (a man's name) < earlier Hüsni , from Arabic husnî ; Müslüman "Moslem, Muslim (adj. and n.)" < Ottoman Turkish müslimân , from Persian mosalmân . Tuvan has one of

2781-720: Is called dominant ). This is fairly common among languages with vowel harmony and may be seen in the Hungarian dative suffix: The dative suffix has two different forms -nak/-nek . The -nak form appears after the root with back vowels ( o and a are back vowels). The -nek form appears after the root with front vowels ( ö and e are front vowels). Vowel harmony often involves dimensions such as In many languages, vowels can be said to belong to particular sets or classes, such as back vowels or rounded vowels. Some languages have more than one system of harmony. For instance, Altaic languages are proposed to have

2884-511: Is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals . The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system . The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent

2987-695: Is closely pronounced as the Finnish front vowel 'ä' [æ] . 7 out of the 10 local dialects have the vowel ë [e] which has never been part of the Hungarian alphabet, and thus is not used in writing. Unrounded front vowels (or Intermediate or neutral vowels) can occur together with either back vowels (e.g. r é p a carrot, k o cs i car) or rounded front vowels (e.g. tető , tündér ), but rounded front vowels and back vowels can occur together only in words of foreign origins (e.g. sofőr = chauffeur, French word for driver). The basic rule

3090-493: Is created by first pressing the key with the diacritic mark, followed by the letter to place it on. This method is known as the dead key technique, as it produces no output of its own but modifies the output of the key pressed after it. The following languages have letters with diacritics that are orthographically distinct from those without diacritics. English is one of the few European languages that does not have many words that contain diacritical marks. Instead, digraphs are

3193-520: Is known, most modern computer systems provide a method to input it . For historical reasons, almost all the letter-with-accent combinations used in European languages were given unique code points and these are called precomposed characters . For other languages, it is usually necessary to use a combining character diacritic together with the desired base letter. Unfortunately, even as of 2024, many applications and web browsers remain unable to operate

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3296-476: Is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase). A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨ Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩ , called ash ), ⟨ Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩ , sometimes called oethel or eðel ),

3399-543: Is not involved. Van der Hulst & van de Weijer (1995) point to two such situations: polysyllabic trigger morphemes may contain non-neutral vowels from opposite harmonic sets and certain target morphemes simply fail to harmonize. Many loanwords exhibit disharmony. For example, Turkish vakit , ('time' [from Arabic waqt ]); * vak ı t would have been expected. There are three classes of vowels in Korean : positive, negative, and neutral. These categories loosely follow

3502-451: Is reconstructed also for Proto-Samoyedic . Hungarian , like its distant relative Finnish, has the same system of front , back , and intermediate (neutral) vowels but is more complex than the one in Finnish, and some vowel harmony processes. The basic rule is that words including at least one back vowel get back vowel suffixes ( kar ba – in(to) the arm), while words excluding back vowels get front vowel suffixes ( kéz be – in(to)

3605-423: 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⟩ . Languages that treat accented letters as variants of the underlying letter usually alphabetize words with such symbols immediately after similar unmarked words. For instance, in German where two words differ only by an umlaut,

3708-491: Is technically correct. Likewise, referring to ±RTR as the sole defining feature of vowel categories in Mongolian is not fully accurate either. In any case, the two vowel categories differ primarily with regards to tongue root position, and ±RTR is a convenient and fairly accurate descriptor for the articulatory parameters involved. Turkic languages inherit their systems of vowel harmony from Proto-Turkic , which already had

3811-597: Is that words including at least one back vowel take back vowel suffixes (e.g. répában in a carrot, kocsiban in a car), while words excluding back vowels usually take front vowel suffixes (except for words including only the vowels i or í , for which there is no general rule, e.g. lisztet , hidat ). Some other rules and guidelines to consider: Grammatical suffixes in Hungarian can have one, two, three, or four forms: An example on basic numerals: Vowel harmony occurred in Southern Mansi . In

3914-401: Is used in two different senses. In the first sense, it refers to any type of long distance assimilatory process of vowels, either progressive or regressive . When used in this sense, the term vowel harmony is synonymous with the term metaphony . In the second sense, vowel harmony refers only to progressive vowel harmony (beginning-to-end). For regressive harmony, the term umlaut

4017-501: Is used. In this sense, metaphony is the general term while vowel harmony and umlaut are both sub-types of metaphony. The term umlaut is also used in a different sense to refer to a type of vowel gradation . This article will use "vowel harmony" for both progressive and regressive harmony. Harmony processes are "long-distance" in the sense that the assimilation involves sounds that are separated by intervening segments (usually consonant segments). In other words, harmony refers to

4120-460: The o is invariant, while the i changes according to the preceding vowel; for example sön ü y o r – "he/she/it fades". Likewise, in the suffix -(y)ken , the e is invariant: Roma'dayk e n – "When in Rome"; and so is the i in the suffix -(y)ebil : inanıl a b i lir – "credible". The suffix -ki exhibits partial harmony, never taking a back vowel but allowing only

4223-540: The African reference alphabet . Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish , Azerbaijani , and Kazakh alphabets. The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩ , which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel . A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to

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4326-556: The Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union's collapse but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless, Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved

4429-508: The English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow

4532-607: The French là ("there") versus la ("the"), which are both pronounced /la/ . In Gaelic type , a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other writing systems , diacritics may perform other functions. Vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat and the Hebrew niqqud systems, indicate vowels that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama (  ्  etc.) and

4635-588: The Hadiyya and Kambaata languages. On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan , Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011. A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory. In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace

4738-580: The Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Mandarin in China, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur. 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. In some cases, letters are used as "in-line diacritics", with

4841-713: The Iranians , Indonesians , Malays , and Turkic peoples . Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script . Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas , Oceania , parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish , Portuguese , English , French , German and Dutch alphabets. It is used for many Austronesian languages , including

4944-788: The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025. There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan , and Mongolia . Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin. In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce

5047-555: The Khanty language , vowel harmony occurs in the Eastern dialects, and affects both inflectional and derivational suffixes. The Vakh-Vasyugan dialect has a particularly extensive system of vowel harmony: Trigger vowels occur in the first syllable of a word, and control the backness of the entire word. Target vowels are affected by vowel harmony and are arranged in seven front-back pairs of similar height and roundedness, which are assigned

5150-576: The People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language , changing its orthography from Sawndip , a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters. With

5253-700: The Turkic -speaking peoples of the former USSR , including Tatars , Bashkirs , Azeri , Kazakh , Kyrgyz and others, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan , Uzbekistan , Turkmenistan , as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova , officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan , Iranian -speaking Tajikistan , and

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5356-399: The abbreviation ⟨ & ⟩ (from Latin : et , lit.   'and', called ampersand ), and ⟨ ẞ ß ⟩ (from ⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩ , the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩ , followed by an ⟨ ʒ ⟩ or ⟨s⟩ , called sharp S or eszett ). A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is

5459-708: The languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages , replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah ; however, the sound values are completely different. Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language , which had previously used Chinese characters . The Latin-based alphabet replaced

5562-665: The 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. German : Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen , lit.   'All of the Sisters of the old City had seen the Birds';. Words from languages natively written with other scripts , such as Arabic or Chinese , are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication,

5665-400: The 19th century. By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As

5768-709: The 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin , from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire . The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant , and Egypt, continued to use Greek as

5871-591: The Arabic sukūn (  ـْـ  ) mark the absence of vowels. Cantillation marks indicate prosody . Other uses include the Early Cyrillic titlo stroke (  ◌҃  ) and the Hebrew gershayim (  ״  ), which, respectively, mark abbreviations or acronyms , and Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals . In Vietnamese and

5974-666: The Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule. In the late 19th century, the Romanians switched to using the Latin alphabet, dropping the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet . Romanian is one of the Romance languages . In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 's reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language , replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of

6077-497: The Latin alphabet in their ( ISO/IEC 646 ) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of

6180-719: The Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet. As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western , Northern , and Central Europe . The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic , and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like

6283-482: The Roman alphabet are transliterated , or romanized, using diacritics. Examples: 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" or HAKṢHMALAWARAYAṀ . It consists of An example of rendering, may be broken depending on browser: ཧྐྵྨླྺྼྻྂ Some users have explored

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6386-425: The United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange , better known as ASCII , which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet . Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 ( Unicode Latin ), have continued to define

6489-542: The Vienna public libraries, for example (before digitization). Among the types of diacritic used in alphabets based on the Latin script are: The tilde, dot, comma, titlo , apostrophe, bar, and colon are sometimes diacritical marks, but also have other uses. Not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, but occurs at

6592-584: The Voiced labial–velar approximant / w / found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u ; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v

6695-414: The acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous ( rébel vs. rebél ) or nonstandard for metrical reasons ( caléndar ), the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced ( warnèd, parlìament ). In certain personal names such as Renée and Zoë , often two spellings exist, and the person's own preference will be known only to those close to them. Even when

6798-506: The acute, grave, and circumflex accents and the diaeresis: ( Cantillation marks do not generally render correctly; refer to Hebrew cantillation#Names and shapes of the ta'amim for a complete table together with instructions for how to maximize the possibility of viewing them in a web browser.) The diacritics 〮 and 〯  , known as Bangjeom ( 방점; 傍點 ), were used to mark pitch accents in Hangul for Middle Korean . They were written to

6901-498: The alphabet of Old English . Another Irish letter, the insular g , developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩ , used in Middle English . Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ⟨w⟩ , eth and thorn with ⟨ th ⟩ , and yogh with ⟨ gh ⟩ . Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet , while eth

7004-619: The appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter ⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting . A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨ sch ⟩ , the Breton ⟨ c'h ⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩ . In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs

7107-419: The assimilation of sounds that are not adjacent to each other. For example, a vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation in a vowel at the end of a word. The assimilation occurs across the entire word in many languages. This is represented schematically in the following diagram: In the diagram above, the V a (type-a vowel) causes the following V b (type-b vowel) to assimilate and become

7210-402: The base letter. The ISO/IEC 646 standard (1967) defined national variations that replace some American graphemes with precomposed characters (such as ⟨é⟩ , ⟨è⟩ and ⟨ë⟩ ), according to language—but remained limited to 95 printable characters. Unicode was conceived to solve this problem by assigning every known character its own code; if this code

7313-425: The beginning of the word, as in the dialects ’Bulengee and ’Dolimi . Because of vowel harmony , all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word. In abugida scripts, like those used to write Hindi and Thai , diacritics indicate vowels, and may occur above, below, before, after, or around the consonant letter they modify. The tittle (dot) on the letter ⟨i⟩ or

7416-490: The breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish -speakers. In 1957,

7519-661: The collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script , which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch . In the following years the Kafa , Oromo , Sidama , Somali , and Wolaitta languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for

7622-462: The combining diacritic concept properly. Depending on the keyboard layout and keyboard mapping , it is more or less easy to enter letters with diacritics on computers and typewriters. Keyboards used in countries where letters with diacritics are the norm, have keys engraved with the relevant symbols. In other cases, such as when the US international or UK extended mappings are used, the accented letter

7725-584: The correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union and European Free Trade Association countries (thus also the Greek and Cyrillic scripts), plus the German minority languages . To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided. Efforts are being made to further develop it into

7828-528: The diacritic developed from initially resembling today's acute accent to a long flourish by the 15th century. With the advent of Roman type it was reduced to the round dot we have today. Several languages of eastern Europe use diacritics on both consonants and vowels, whereas in western Europe digraphs are more often used to change consonant sounds. Most languages in Europe use diacritics on vowels, aside from English where there are typically none (with some exceptions ). These diacritics are used in addition to

7931-547: The domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel. Common phonological features that define the natural classes of vowels involved in vowel harmony include vowel backness , vowel height , nasalization , roundedness , and advanced and retracted tongue root . Vowel harmony is found in many agglutinative languages. The given domain of vowel harmony taking effect often spans across morpheme boundaries, and suffixes and prefixes will usually follow vowel harmony rules. The term vowel harmony

8034-684: The front (positive) and mid (negative) vowels. Middle Korean had strong vowel harmony; however, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Korean. In modern Korean, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia , adjectives , adverbs , conjugation , and interjections . The vowel ㅡ ( eu ) is considered a partially neutral and a partially negative vowel. There are other traces of vowel harmony in modern Korean: many native Korean words tend to follow vowel harmony, such as 사람 ( saram , 'person') and 부엌 ( bu-eok , 'kitchen'). 양성모음 (Yangseong moeum) 음성모음 (eumseong moeum) 중성모음 (jungseong moeum) Mongolian exhibits both

8137-562: The front-voweled variant -kü : dünk ü – "belonging to yesterday"; yarınk i – "belonging to tomorrow". Most Turkish words do not only have vowel harmony for suffixes, but also internally. However, there are many exceptions. Compound words are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have to harmonize between members of the compound (thus forms like bu | gün "this|day" = "today" are permissible). Vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords , as in otobüs – from French "autobus". There are also

8240-415: The hand). Single-vowel words which have only the neutral vowels ( i , í or é ) are unpredictable, but e takes a front-vowel suffix. One essential difference in classification between Hungarian and Finnish is that standard Hungarian (along with 3 out of 10 local dialects) does not observe the difference between Finnish 'ä' [æ] and 'e' [e]  – the Hungarian front vowel 'e' [ɛ]

8343-706: The left of a syllable in vertical writing and above a syllable in horizontal writing. In addition to the above vowel marks, transliteration of Syriac sometimes includes ə , e̊ or superscript (or often nothing at all) to represent an original Aramaic schwa that became lost later on at some point in the development of Syriac. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons. Some non-alphabetic scripts also employ symbols that function essentially as diacritics. Different languages use different rules to put diacritic characters in alphabetical order. For example, French and Portuguese treat letters with diacritical marks

8446-422: The letter ⟨j⟩ , of the Latin alphabet originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish ⟨i⟩ from the minims (downstrokes) of adjacent letters. It first appeared in the 11th century in the sequence ii (as in ingeníí ), then spread to i adjacent to m, n, u , and finally to all lowercase i s. The ⟨j⟩ , originally a variant of i , inherited the tittle. The shape of

8549-564: The letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet , which are the same letters as the English alphabet . Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of

8652-534: The limits of rendering in web browsers and other software by "decorating" words with excessive nonsensical diacritics per character to produce so-called Zalgo text . Diacritics for Latin script in Unicode: Latin script The Latin script , also known as the Roman script , is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet , derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which

8755-489: 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 and piñata ); 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

8858-473: The most complete systems of vowel harmony among the Turkic languages. Persian is a language which includes various types of regressive and progressive vowel harmony in different words and expressions. In Persian, progressive vowel harmony only applies to prepositions/post-positions when attached to pronouns. In Persian, regressive vowel harmony, some features spread from the triggering non-initial vowel to

8961-740: The name of a person is spelled with a diacritic, like Charlotte Brontë , this may be dropped in English-language articles, and even in official documents such as passports , due either to carelessness, the typist not knowing how to enter letters with diacritical marks, or technical reasons ( California , for example, does not allow names with diacritics, as the computer system cannot process such characters). They also appear in some worldwide company names and/or trademarks, such as Nestlé and Citroën . The following languages have letter-diacritic combinations that are not considered independent letters. Several languages that are not written with

9064-786: 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⟩ ,

9167-441: The same function as ancillary glyphs, in that they modify the sound of the letter preceding them, as in the case of the "h" in the English pronunciation of "sh" and "th". Such letter combinations are sometimes even collated as a single distinct letter. For example, the spelling sch was traditionally often treated as a separate letter in German. Words with that spelling were listed after all other words spelled with s in card catalogs in

9270-406: The same type of vowel (and thus they become, metaphorically, "in harmony"). The vowel that causes the vowel assimilation is frequently termed the trigger while the vowels that assimilate (or harmonize ) are termed targets . When the vowel triggers lie within the root or stem of a word and the affixes contain the targets, this is called stem-controlled vowel harmony (the opposite situation

9373-567: The speakers of several Uralic languages , most notably Hungarian , Finnish and Estonian . The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages , as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism . The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity . The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by

9476-442: The spelling, such as the diaeresis on naïve and Noël , the acute from café , the circumflex in the word crêpe , and the cedille in façade . All these diacritics, however, are frequently omitted in writing, and English is the only major modern European language that does not have diacritics in common usage. In Latin-script alphabets in other languages, diacritics may distinguish between homonyms , such as

9579-496: The start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een ( pronounced [ən] ) meaning "a" or "an", and één , ( pronounced [e:n] ) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent. English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary . Historically, in formal writing,

9682-528: The target vowel in the previous syllable. The application and non-application of this backness harmony which can also be considered rounding harmony. Many, though not all, Uralic languages show vowel harmony between front and back vowels. Vowel harmony is often hypothesized to have existed in Proto-Uralic , though its original scope remains a matter of discussion. Vowel harmony is found in Nganasan and

9785-412: The unaccented vowels ⟨a⟩ , ⟨e⟩ , ⟨i⟩ , ⟨o⟩ , ⟨u⟩ , as the acute accent in Spanish only modifies stress within the word or denotes a distinction between homonyms , and does not modify the sound of a letter. For a comprehensive list of the collating orders in various languages, see Collating sequence . Modern computer technology

9888-428: The underlying vowel). In Spanish, the grapheme ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a distinct letter, different from ⟨n⟩ and collated between ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩ , as it denotes a different sound from that of a plain ⟨n⟩ . But the accented vowels ⟨á⟩ , ⟨é⟩ , ⟨í⟩ , ⟨ó⟩ , ⟨ú⟩ are not separated from

9991-463: 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. English speakers and writers once used the diaeresis more often than now in words such as coöperation (from Fr. coopération ), zoölogy (from Grk. zoologia ), and seeër (now more commonly see-er or simply seer ) as

10094-406: The word without it is sorted first in German dictionaries (e.g. schon and then schön , or fallen and then fällen ). However, when names are concerned (e.g. in phone books or in author catalogues in libraries), umlauts are often treated as combinations of the vowel with a suffixed ⟨e⟩ ; Austrian phone books now treat characters with umlauts as separate letters (immediately following

10197-492: The world. The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration , the term " romanization " ( British English : "romanisation") is often found. Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The numeral system

10300-527: The written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ ch ⟩ , ⟨ ng ⟩ , ⟨ rh ⟩ , ⟨ sh ⟩ , ⟨ ph ⟩ , ⟨ th ⟩ in English, and ⟨ ij ⟩ , ⟨ee⟩ , ⟨ ch ⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the ⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as ⟨IJ⟩ or the ligature ⟨IJ⟩ , but never as ⟨Ij⟩ , and it often takes

10403-402: Was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j , came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until

10506-669: Was developed mostly in countries that speak Western European languages (particularly English), and many early binary encodings were developed with a bias favoring English—a language written without diacritical marks. With computer memory and computer storage at premium, early character sets were limited to the Latin alphabet, the ten digits and a few punctuation marks and conventional symbols. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII ), first published in 1963, encoded just 95 printable characters. It included just four free-standing diacritics—acute, grave, circumflex and tilde—which were to be used by backspacing and overprinting

10609-699: Was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia . The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans , and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Ancient Romans . Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet. The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet , and the 26 most widespread letters are

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