Double acute accent
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Diacritical marks |
|---|
|
accent
breve ( ˘ )
hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) |
| Marks sometimes used as diacritics |
|
apostrophe ( ’ ) |
| 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 |
[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.
[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 and some road signs, 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] Computer Input
In LaTeX, the double acute accent is typeset with the \H{} command. For example, the name Paul Erdős would be typeset as:
Paul Erd\H{o}s
[edit] See also
[edit] External link
- Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (contains some incorrect/sloppy data on history)
| The ISO basic Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
| history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
