Breve

A breve (/ˈbriːv/; French: brève [ˈbʁɛv]; from the Latin brevis “short, brief”) is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It resembles the caron (the wedge or háček in Czech), but is rounded, while the caron has a sharp tip. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve).

Length

The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯ which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg and other languages. (However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels: it is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short.)

In Cyrillic script, a breve is used for Й. In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (semivowel U) and in the Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet uses a breve for Ӂ (the equivalent of G before E or I in the Latin script). In Chuvash, a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (E-breve). Note that traditional Cyrillic breve differs in shape, being thicker on the edges of the curve and thinner in the middle, from the Latin one. In Latin types, the shape becomes “ears”-like.^[1]

In Esperanto, it is used above the u to form a non-syllabic u, similar to the sound of an English w.

In the transcription of Sinhala, the breve over an m or an n indicates a prenasalized consonant; for example, n̆da is used to represent [ⁿda].

Other uses

In other languages, it is used for other purposes.

• In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the mid-central vowel, as in măr (apple).
• G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish but may be pronounced [ɰ] in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.
• The breve, together with the circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.
• The McCune-Reischauer romanization system of the Korean alphabet's script uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate the vowels ㅓ (ŏ) and ㅡ (ŭ).^[2]
• H-breve below Ḫ ḫ is used to transliterate the Arabic character Ḫāʾ (خ) in DIN 31635. It is also used to transliterate Akkadian, Hittite cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• On German-language maps, a double breve is often used in abbreviated placenames that end in -b͝g., short for -burg, a common suffix originally meaning “castle”. This prevents misinterpretation as -berg, another common suffix in placenames (meaning “mountain”). Thus, for example, Freib͝g. stands for Freiburg, not Freiberg.

Note that Pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese; the breve cannot be used as a substitute in computer environments.

Encoding

Unicode and HTML code (decimal numeric character reference) for breve characters.

In LaTeX the controls \u{o} and \breve{o} puts a breve over the letter o.

International Phonetic Alphabet

Notes

See also

• Caron
• Macron
• Inverted breve

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents