Palatal hook
The palatal hook ( ̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc.
The IPA recommended that esh ( ʃ ) and ezh (ʒ) not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ʆ and ʓ. However, versions with the hook may have been used by some authors.
The palatal hook was withdrawn in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ƫ becomes tʲ).
Computer encoding
Unicode includes both a combining character for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including superscript letters with palatal hooks.
While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest were not added until 2005. As such, font support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.
| Appearance | Code point | Name |
|---|---|---|
| ̡ | U+0321 | COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW |
| ᶀ | U+1D80 | LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ꞔ | U+A794 | LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶁ | U+1D81 | LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶂ | U+1D82 | LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶃ | U+1D83 | LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ꞕ | U+A795 | LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶄ | U+1D84 | LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶅ | U+1D85 | LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶆ | U+1D86 | LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶇ | U+1D87 | LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶈ | U+1D88 | LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶉ | U+1D89 | LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶊ | U+1D8A | LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶋ | U+1D8B | LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ƫ | U+01AB | LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶌ | U+1D8C | LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶍ | U+1D8D | LATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶎ | U+1D8E | LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶪ | U+1DAA | MODIFIER LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK |
| ᶵ | U+1DB5 | MODIFIER LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK |