A
diacritic
[1]
is a mark put above, below, through or on a
letter
. Some examples of diacritics are an
acute accent
or a
grave accent
. The word comes from the
Greek word
διακριτικ?? (
transl.
diakritikos, 'distinguishing').
Usually, it affects the way the word is said (pronounced). Most diacritics concern
pronunciation
because most
alphabets
do not describe the sounds of words exactly. Diacritics are rare in
English
, but common in many other languages.
English
orthography
often uses
digraphs
(like "ph", "sh", "oo", and "ea") rather than diacritics to show more sounds than can be shown with single letters of the
Latin alphabet
. Unlike other systems (such as
Spanish
) where the spelling shows how to say the words, English pronunciation is so varied that diacritics alone would not make it
phonetic
. By using digraphs we show sounds which are not shown by single letters.
Diacritics are not used much in modern English. Two types of diacritics have become part of everyday English: the dot above the "i" or "j" and the
apostrophe
. But they are no longer commonly thought of as being diacritical. The apostrophe is used to show missing letters (elision,
it's
to replace
it is
) and show
possession
(as in
Mike's car
).
In most other cases, use of diacritics for native English words is considered
old-fashioned
(not used anymore).
Diaereses
(similar to
umlauts
) can be used on words where two
vowels
next to each other are pronounced separately like
noone
,
reestablished
, or
cooperate
(two vowels pronounced
together
are a
diphthong
). This method is still used sometimes.
[2]
Diacritics are sometimes used in
loanwords
(words of foreign origin), such as
naive
,
entree
,
pate
,
facade,
[3]
which are French words.
Letter
e
: common are the
acute accent
e
(rising voice, as in the
French
word nee),
grave accent
e
(lowering voice);
eleve
has (from the left) acute, grave and silent e. The
cedilla
c
signals a soft c, sounding like an
s
in English.
A different principle is illustrated by the
circumflex
i
. This usually shows the loss of letter: e.g. maistre (Middle French) > maitre (modern French). Thus its function is historical. Also, less often, the circumflex is used to distinguish between
homophones
. These are words spelt the same, but with different meanings. Example:
sur
= on, but
sur
= safe. In those cases the
pronunciation
of the two words may be different.
In
Spanish
the acute accent simply signals stress, e.g.
educacion
. There the stress is on the last
vowel
, not on the usual second to last. Second to last vowel (
syllable
) is the usual position for stress in spoken Spanish. It is usually not signalled by a printed accent. Where the stress is in its usual place, the end
consonant
is often dropped in speech.
The
tilde
n
is pronounced something like
ny
. It counts as a separate letter in their dictionaries, coming after
n
.
The double
L
is pronounced as our
Y
and LL is in Spanish dictionaries in its own section, after the single L section.
The
umlaut
u
in
German
is pronounced
ue
, and is less used in modern German. Historical name-spellings should always keep the umlaut if it was used for that name.
The
Scandinavian
languages treat the characters with diacritics
a
,
o
and
a
as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after
z
. Usually
a
is sorted as equal to
æ
(ash) and
o
is sorted as equal to
ø
(o-slash). Also,
aa
, when used as an alternative spelling to
a
, is sorted as such. Other letters modified by diacritics are treated as variants of the underlying letter, with the exception that
u
is frequently sorted as
y
.
Scripts for
semitic languages
such as
Arabic
and
Hebrew
have a wide variety of diacritics. This is partly because the scripts for semitic languages were originally formed without separate letters for vowels, and partly because some of the languages (Arabic in particular) are spoken in a number of dialects.
The diacritics in Hebrew and Arabic are not always used, however.
- ↑
- ↑
Thomas Burns McArthur and Roshan McArthur (2005).
Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language
. Oxford University Press.
ISBN
9780192806376
.
- ↑
Dr Lim Chin Lam (11 November 2011).
"How foreign is English?"
.
The Star
. Archived from
the original
on 13 May 2012
. Retrieved
17 June
2012
.