Double acute accent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diacritical marks
accent acute accent ( ˊ ) double acute accent ( ˝ ) grave accent ( ˋ ) breve ( ˘ ) caron / háček ( ˇ ) cedilla ( ¸ ) circumflex ( ˆ ) diaeresis / umlaut ( ¨ ) dot ( · ) anunaasika ( ˙ ) anusvaara (  ̣ ) hook / dấu hỏi (  ̉ ) macron ( ˉ ) ogonek ( ˛ ) ring / kroužek ( ˚ ) rough breathing / spiritus asper (  ῾ ) smooth breathing / spiritus lenis (  ᾿ )
Marks sometimes used as diacritics
apostrophe ( ’ ) bar ( | ) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) hyphen ( ˗ ) tilde ( ˜ ) titlo (  ҃ )

Ő	ő
Ű	ű

The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. The signs formed with diacritic marks count as letters of their own right in the Hungarian alphabet.

Contents 1 Use in Hungarian 2 Other uses 3 Technical notes 4 External link

[edit] Use in Hungarian

Standard Hungarian has 14 vowels in a symmetrical system: seven short vowels, (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written in the case of a, e, i, o, u with an acute accent, and in the case of ö, ü with the double acute (instead of using diaeresis+acute). (Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it has a lexical and grammatical distinctive function).

The double acute acts as combined acute with a diaeresis, giving the longer version of ö and ü.

short	a	e	i	o	ö	u	ü
long	á	é	í	ó	ő	ú	ű

Length marks first appeared in the Hungarian orthography in the 15th century under the influence of the Hussite orthography. Initially, only á and é were marked as these two vowels have a noticeable qualitative difference in addition to the quantitative one. Later í, ó, ú were marked as well, but up to the 18th century length marks were not used for ö and ü. In the 18th century, still before the Hungarian typography was fixed, the diaeresis+acute form (ǘ) was used in some printed documents. The double-acute version was found to be a more esthetic solution and introduced by 19th century typographers.

Hungarian language
Alphabet, including ő ű and cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs
Phonetics and phonology
Vowel harmony
Grammar, including noun phrases and verbs
T-V distinction
Regulatory body
Tongue-twisters
English words from Hungarian
Hungarian pronunciation of E.
Hungarian name
Old Hungarian script (runes)
edit

[edit] Other uses

The double acute accent is also used in south Slavic phonetic alphabets as used by linguists to show a certain kind of tone. It is not used in orthography, and is not part of any southern Slavic alphabet.

In some North American Native languages, like Tanacross (Athapascan), it is used to indicate an extra-high tone.

The tonal marking system in IPA (and many other phonetic alphabets) is the following (demonstrated with an 'e'):

	Extra high	High	Mid	Low	Extra low
diacritic system	e̋	é	ē	è	ȅ
adscript system	e˥	e˦	e˧	e˨	e˩

In some Faroese handwritten typographies, ő is used instead of ø.

[edit] Technical notes

O and U with double acute accents are supported in the ISO 8859-2 and Unicode character sets.

All occurrences of "double acute" in the Unicode 4.1 standard:

Ő	Ő	U+0150	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
ő	ő	U+0151	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
Ű	Ű	U+0170	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
ű	ű	U+0171	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
˝	˝	U+02DD	DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT
˶	˶	U+02F6	MODIFIER LETTER MIDDLE DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT
̋	̋	U+030B	COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT
Ӳ	Ӳ	U+04F2	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
ӳ	ӳ	U+04F3	CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER U WITH DOUBLE ACUTE
ᐥ	ᐥ	U+1425	CANADIAN SYLLABICS FINAL DOUBLE ACUTE

Note, that the last entry is unrelated to the others above, and got its name purely by analogy of its shape.

[edit] External link

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (contains some incorrect/sloppy data on history)

The Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • ISO 646 • list of letters