1.
Diacritic
–
A diacritic – also diacritical mark, diacritical point, or diacritical sign – is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω, diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave, are often called accents, diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of marks in the Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là versus la that are both pronounced /la/, in Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other alphabetic systems, diacritical marks may perform other functions, vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat and the Hebrew niqqud systems, indicate vowels that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama and the Arabic sukūn mark the absence of a vowel, in the Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Chinese, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur. In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new and this varies from language to language, and may vary from case to case within a language. ◌ː – triangular colon, used in the IPA to mark long vowels, not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word. In abugida scripts, like those used to write Hindi and Thai, diacritics indicate vowels, the tittle on the letter i of the Latin alphabet originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish i from the minims of adjacent letters. It first appeared in the 11th century in the sequence ii, then spread to i adjacent to m, n, u, the j, originally a variant of i, inherited the tittle. The shape of the diacritic developed from initially resembling todays acute accent to a flourish by the 15th century. With the advent of Roman type it was reduced to the round dot we have today, tanwīn symbols, Serve a grammatical role in Arabic. The sign ـً is most commonly written in combination with alif, waṣla, Comes most commonly at the beginning of a word. Indicates a type of hamza that is pronounced only when the letter is read at the beginning of the talk, ḥarakāt, fatḥa kasra ḍamma sukūn The ḥarakāt or vowel points serve two purposes, They serve as a phonetic guide. They indicate the presence of short vowels or their absence, at the last letter of a word, the vowel point reflects the inflection case or conjugation mood. For nouns, The ḍamma is for the nominative, fatḥa for the accusative, for verbs, the ḍamma is for the imperfective, fatḥa for the perfective, and the sukūn is for verbs in the imperative or jussive moods
Diacritic
–
Hunminjeongeum, the Korean alphabet
Diacritic
–
Blackboard used in class at
Harvard shows students' efforts at placing the
ü and
acute accent diacritic used in
Spanish orthography.
2.
Double acute accent
–
The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to by typographers as Hungarumlaut, the signs formed with diacritic marks are letters in their own right in the Hungarian alphabet. Length marks first appeared in Hungarian orthography in the 15th-century Hussite Bible, initially, only á and é were marked, since they are different in quality as well as length. Later í, ó, ú were marked as well, in the 18th century, before Hungarian orthography became fixed, u and o with umlaut + acute were used in some printed documents. 19th century typographers introduced the double acute as an aesthetic solution. In Hungarian, the acute is thought of as the letter having both an umlaut and an acute accent. Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it distinguishes different words and grammatical forms. At the beginning of the 20th century, the letter A̋ a̋ was sometimes used in Slovak as a variant of the short vowel Ä ä. Other long vowels are written with an acute accent. The letter is used for this purpose in Slovak phonetic transcription systems. In handwriting in German and Swedish, the umlaut is written similarly to a double acute. The Chuvash language written in the Cyrillic script uses a double-acute Ӳ, ӳ /y/ as a front counterpart of Cyrillic letter У, у /u/, in other minority languages of Russia, the umlauted form Ӱ is used instead. Classical Danish handwriting uses ó for ø, which becomes a problem when writing Faroese in the same tradition, thus ő is sometimes used for ø in Faroese. The IPA and many other phonetic alphabets use two systems to indicate tone, a system and an adscript system. In the diacritic system, the double acute represents a high tone. One may encounter this use as a sign in some IPA-derived orthographies of minority languages. In line with the IPA usage it denotes the extra-high tone, O and U with double acute accents are supported in the Code page 852, ISO 8859-2 and Unicode character sets. Some of the box drawing characters of the original DOS code page 437 were sacrificed in order to put in more accented letters, in ISO 8859-2 Ő, ő, Ű, ű take the place of some similar looking letters of ISO 8859-1
Double acute accent
–
Example of an ő on a Faroese traffic sign
Double acute accent
–
Hungarian keyboard
3.
Cedilla
–
A cedilla, also known as cedilha or cédille, is a hook or tail added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan, French, and Portuguese, it is used only under the c, and the letter is called respectively c trencada, c cédille. The tail originated in Spain as the half of a miniature cursive z. The word “cedilla” is the diminutive of the Old Spanish name for this letter, an obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla. The earliest use in English cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary, chambers’ Cyclopædia is cited for the printer-trade variant ceceril in use in 1738. The main use in English is not universal and applies to words from French and Portuguese such as “façade”, “limaçon”. This can add to confusion as the use of commas as opposed to cedillas varies by language, the most frequent character with cedilla is ç. In Occitan, Friulian and Catalan ç can also be found at the beginning of a word or at the end and it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish, and Turkmen. It is also used this way in Manx, to distinguish it from the velar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨ç⟩ represents the palatal fricative. Azerbaijani Crimean Tatar Gagauz Tatar Turkmen Romanian Kurdish In HTML character entity references Ş, comparatively, some consider the diacritics on the Latvian consonants ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, and formerly ŗ to be cedillas. Although their Adobe glyph names are commas, their names in the Unicode Standard are g, k, l, n, the letters were introduced to the Unicode standard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. The uppercase equivalent Ģ sometimes has a regular cedilla, four letters in Marshallese have cedillas, ļ, m̧, ņ and o̧. In standard printed text they are always cedillas, and their omission or the substitution of comma below and dot below diacritics are nonstandard. As of 2011, many font rendering engines do not display any of these properly, Unicode has precombined glyphs for these letters, but most quality fonts display them with comma below diacritics to accommodate the expectations of Latvian orthography. This is considered nonstandard in Marshallese, the use of a zero-width non-joiner between the letter and the diacritic can alleviate this problem, ļ and ņ may display properly, but may not, see below. M̧ and o̧ do not currently exist in Unicode as precombined glyphs, most Unicode fonts issued with Windows do not display combining diacritics properly, showing them too far to the right of the letter, as with Tahoma and Times New Roman. This mostly affects m̧, and may or may not affect o̧, but some common Unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS, Cambria and Lucida Sans Unicode do not have this problem
Cedilla
–
Origin of the cedilla from the
Visigothic z
4.
Diaeresis (diacritic)
–
The diaeresis, also spelled diæresis or dieresis and also known as the tréma or the umlaut, is a diacritical mark that consists of two dots placed over a letter, usually a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle, the diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics marking two distinct phonological phenomena. The diaeresis represents the phenomenon known as diaeresis or hiatus in which a vowel letter is not pronounced as part of a digraph or diphthong. The umlaut, in contrast, indicates a sound shift and these two diacritics originated separately, the diaeresis is considerably older. Nevertheless, in computer systems using Unicode, the umlaut and diaeresis diacritics are identical. The same symbol is used as a diacritic in other cases. For example, in Albanian and Tagalog ë represents a schwa, the word diaeresis is from Greek diaíresis, meaning division, separation, or distinction. Umlaut is the German name of both the Germanic umlaut, a sound-law also known as i-mutation, and the corresponding diacritic. The diaeresis indicates that two adjoining letters that would form a digraph and be pronounced as one are instead to be read as separate vowels in two syllables. The diaeresis indicates that a vowel should be pronounced apart from the letter that precedes it, for example, in the spelling coöperate, the diaeresis reminds the reader that the word has four syllables co-op-er-ate, not three, *coop-er-ate. In British English this usage has been considered obsolete for many years, nevertheless, it is still used by the US magazine The New Yorker. In English language texts it is perhaps most familiar in the spellings naïve, Noël, and Chloë, languages such as Dutch, Catalan, French, Galician and Spanish make regular use of the diaeresis. However, it was used to indicate that a vowel formed its own syllable, as in ηϋ. In Modern Greek, αϊ and οϊ represent the diphthongs /ai̯/ and /oi̯/, and εϊ the disyllabic sequence /e. i/, whereas αι, οι, and ει transcribe the simple vowels /e/, /i/, and /i/. The diacritic can be the one on a vowel, as in ακαδημαϊκός akadēmaïkos academic, or in combination with an acute accent. The diaeresis was borrowed for this purpose in several languages of western and southern Europe, among them Occitan, Catalan, French, Dutch, Welsh, when a vowel in Greek was stressed, it did not assimilate to a preceding vowel but remained as a separate syllable. Such vowels were marked with an accent such as the acute, for example, the Portuguese words saia skirt and the imperfect saía I used to leave differ in that the sequence /ai/ forms a diphthong in the former, but is a hiatus in the latter. In Catalan, the digraphs ai, ei, oi, au, eu, to indicate exceptions to this rule, a diaeresis mark is placed on the second vowel, without this the words raïm and diürn would be read * and *, respectively
Diaeresis (diacritic)
–
Letters with umlaut on a
German computer keyboard.
5.
Hook above
–
In typesetting, the hook above is a diacritic mark placed on top of vowels in the Vietnamese alphabet. In shape it looks like a question mark without the dot underneath. For example, a capital A with a hook is Ả, the hook is usually written to the right of the circumflex in conventional Vietnamese orthography. If Vietnamese characters are unavailable, it is replaced by a question mark after the vowel. The Southern dipping tone is similar to the intonation in English. Apart from precomposed characters, in multiple scripts, the diacritical mark is encoded at U+0309 ̉ combining hook above Horn Hook More information for typographers
Hook above
6.
Iota subscript
–
The iota subscript is a diacritic mark in the Greek alphabet shaped like a small vertical stroke or miniature iota ⟨ι⟩ placed below the letter. It can occur with the vowel letters eta ⟨η⟩, omega ⟨ω⟩ and it represents the former presence of an offglide after the vowel, forming a so‐called long diphthong. Such diphthongs —phonologically distinct from the normal or short diphthongs —were a feature of ancient Greek in the classical era. During the Roman and Byzantine eras, the iota, now mute, was still written as a normal letter but was often simply left out. The iota subscript was invented by Byzantine philologists in the 12th century AD as an editorial symbol marking the places where such spelling variation occurred, the alternative practice, of writing the mute iota as a full-sized letter ⟨ι⟩, is known as iota adscript. In Greek, the subscript is called ὑπογεγραμμένη, analogously, the adscript is sometimes called προσγεγραμμένη, from the verb προσγράφω, to write before. As a phonological phenomenon, the original diphthongs denoted by ⟨ᾳ, ῃ, some more recent works prefer the term long diphthongs, others retain the term improper diphthong. Besides these it also occurs in the roots of words and names, for instance ᾠδή ode, ᾍδης Hades. The iota subscript is today considered a feature in the spelling of Ancient Greek. In some modern editions of texts, the historical spelling with a restored full-size adscript ⟨ι⟩ is preferred. The same is true for works dealing with epigraphy, paleography or other philological contexts where adherence to original historical spellings is considered important. Different conventions exist for the treatment of subscript/adscript iota with uppercase letters, in Western printing, the most common practice is to use subscript diacritics only in lowercase environments and to use an adscript instead whenever the host letter is capitalized. When this happens in a mixed-case spelling environment, then the adscript iota regularly takes the shape of the lowercase iota letter. In an all-capitals environment, the adscript is also regularly capitalized, in Greece, a more common convention is to print subscript diacritics both with lowercase and uppercase letters alike. In Modern Greek, subscript iota was generally retained in use in the spelling of the archaizing Katharevousa and it can also be found regularly in older printed Demotic in the 19th and early 20th century, but it is often absent from the modern spelling of present-day Standard Modern Greek. In the monotonic orthography, subscript iota is not used. In transliteration of Greek into the Latin alphabet, the subscript is often omitted. The Chicago Manual of Style, however, recommends the iota subscript be transliterated by an i on the line, in a few Latin words that were borrowed from Greek at an early date, ⟨ῳ⟩ is reflected as ⟨oe⟩, e. g. τραγῳδία → tragoedia, tragedy
Iota subscript
–
Iota subscripts in the word ᾠδῇ, ("
ode ", dative)
7.
Ogonek
–
The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American languages. An ogonek can also be attached to the top of a vowel in Old Norse-Icelandic to show length or vowel affection, for example, o᷎ represents i-mutated ø. — Vikar Margit Andersdotter, I fäbodlivet i gamla tider, example in Western Apache, lęke created The use of the ogonek to indicate nasality is common in the transcription of the indigenous languages of the Americas. This usage originated in the created by Christian missionaries to transcribe these languages. Later, the practice was continued by Americanist anthropologists and linguists who still follow this convention in phonetic transcription to the present day, the ogonek is also used in academic transliteration of Old Church Slavonic. In Polish, Old Church Slavonic, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua, Tłįch Yatiì, Slavey, Dëne Sųłiné, thus, the mark is now de facto an indicator of vowel length. The mark also is useful for distinguishing different grammatical forms that would otherwise have the written form even if they are pronounced differently. In Rheinische Dokumenta, it marks vowels that are more open than those denoted by their base letters Ää, Oo, in two cases, it can be combined with umlaut marks. The E caudata, a similar to an e with ogonek, evolved from a ligature of a and e in medieval scripts, in Latin. The O caudata of Old Norse is used to write the open-mid back rounded vowel, medieval Nordic manuscripts show this hook in both directions, in combination with several vowels. Despite this distinction, the ogonek is sometimes used in discussions of typesetting and encoding Norse texts. The ogonek is functionally equivalent to the cedilla and comma diacritics, in handwritten text the marks may even look the same. The ogonek should be almost the size as a descender. When used for Native American languages, the ogonek should be placed directly under the rather than to the side as is the norm for European languages. European-style placement is acceptable when no other alternatives are available, in LaTeX2e, macro \k will typeset a letter with ogonek, if it is supported by the font encoding, e. g. \k will typeset ą. So \textogonekcentered better fits the latter purposes, actually, \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered, and \k is defined to result in \textogonekcentered. The package TIPA, activated by using the command \usepackage, offers a different way, Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents Polish Diacritics — How To. Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska
Ogonek
–
Difference between the correct placement of the ogonek in European languages (left) and Native American languages (right)
8.
Greek diacritics
–
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology, the simple monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics. Polytonic orthography is the system for Ancient Greek and Medieval Greek. The acute accent, the accent, and the circumflex indicate different kinds of pitch accent. The rough breathing indicates the presence of the /h/ sound before a letter, monotonic orthography is the standard system for Modern Greek. A tonos and a diaeresis can be combined on a vowel to indicate a stressed vowel after a hiatus. Although it is not a diacritic, the hypodiastole has in a way the function of a sound-changing diacritic in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. The original Greek alphabet did not have any diacritics, the Greek alphabet is attested since the 8th century BC. Until 403 BC, variations of the Greek alphabet—which exclusively used what is now known as capitals —were used in different cities, from 403 on, the Athenians decided to employ a version of the Ionian alphabet. With the spread of Koine Greek, a continuation of the Attic dialect, the Ionian alphabet, however, was also made up only of capitals. During the Hellenistic period, Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the breathings—marks of aspiration and it was not until the 2nd century AD that the accents and breathings appeared sporadically in the papyri. The need for the diacritics arose from the divergence between spelling and pronunciation. The majuscule, i. e. a system where text is entirely in capital letters, was used until the 8th century. By the Byzantine period, the rule which turns an acute accent on the last syllable into a grave accent —except before a punctuation sign or an enclitic—had been firmly established. Certain authors have argued that the grave originally denoted the absence of accent, the rule is, in their view. Originally certain proclitic words lost their accent before another word and received the grave, others, drawing e. g. on evidence from Ancient Greek music, consider that the grave was linguistically real and expressed a word-final modification of the acute pitch. In the later development of the language, the ancient pitch accent was replaced by an intensity or stress accent, making the three types of accent identical, and the /h/ sound became silent. At the beginning of the 20th century, the grave was replaced by the acute, and the iota subscript and the breathings on the rho were abolished, except in printed texts
Greek diacritics
–
The Lord's Prayer in a 4th-century uncial manuscript
Codex Sinaiticus, before the adoption of
minuscule polytonic. Note spelling errors: elth a tō ē basil i a (ΕΛΘΑΤΩΗΒΑΣΙΛΙΑ) instead of elth e tō ē basil ei a (ΕΛΘΕΤΩ Η ΒΑΣΙΛΕΙΑ).
Greek diacritics
–
An example of polytonic text with
ekphonetic neumes in red ink from a Byzantine manuscript, of 1020 AD, displaying the beginning of the
Gospel of Luke (1:3-6)
9.
Rough breathing
–
In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing, is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an /h/ sound before a vowel, diphthong, or after rho. It remained in the polytonic orthography even after the Hellenistic period, in the monotonic orthography of Modern Greek phonology, in use since 1982, it is not used at all. The absence of an /h/ sound is marked by the smooth breathing, the rough breathing comes from the left-hand half of the letter H. In some Greek dialects, the letter was used for, in other dialects, it was used for the vowel, and this usage survives in the modern system of writing Ancient Greek, and in Modern Greek. The rough breathing is placed over a vowel, or over the second vowel of an initial diphthong. αἵρεσις haíresis choice ἥρως hḗrōs hero An upsilon or rho at the beginning of a word always takes a rough breathing, ὕμνος hýmnos hymn ῥυθμός rhythmós rhythm In some writing conventions, the rough breathing is written on the second of two rhos in the middle of a word. This is transliterated as rrh in Latin, διάῤῥοια diárrhoia diarrhoea In crasis, when the second word has a rough breathing, the contracted vowel does not take a rough breathing. Instead, the consonant before the vowel changes to the aspirated equivalent, if possible. πρωθυπουργός, from πρῶτος and ὑπουργός, where the latter was originally aspirated, in Unicode, the code point assigned to the rough breathing is U+0314 ̔ COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE. It is intended to be used in all alphabetic scripts and it was also used in the original Latin transcription of Armenian for example with U+0074 t LATIN SMALL LETTER T in t̔. The pair of space + combining rough breathing is U+02BD ʽ MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA ABOVE, basically, U+1FFE was encoded for full roundtrip compatibility with legacy 8-bit encodings of the Greek script in documents where dasia was encoded before the Greek capital letter it modifies. The rough breathing was also used in the early Cyrillic alphabet when writing the Old Church Slavonic language and this left half ring may also be used for the Latin transcription of Armenian
Rough breathing
–
Tack-shaped archaic consonantal Heta, together with a lowercase variant designed for
modern typography.
10.
Apostrophe
–
The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, through Latin and French, the apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. Such incorrect substitutes as ´ and are common in unprofessional texts, the apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice, introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure, from the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, so apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word. The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have made to the possessive. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was used for all possessive singular forms. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es, the plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s, however, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The apostrophe is used to indicate possession and this convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For singulars, the possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English. Summary of rules for most situations Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the s or the corresponding sound /s/ or /z/ but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs. Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take ’s in the possessive, e. g. someone’s, a cat’s toys, women’s. Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the s when the possessive is formed
Apostrophe
–
Sign to Green Craigs housing development
Apostrophe
–
A sign diverting passengers to a temporary
taxi rank at
Leeds railway station, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, with the extraneous apostrophe crossed out by an unknown
copy editor.
11.
Prime (symbol)
–
The prime symbol, double prime symbol, triple prime symbol, quadruple prime symbol etc. are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, the sciences, linguistics and music. The prime symbol is similar to the Hebrew geresh, but in modern fonts the geresh is designed to be aligned with the Hebrew letters. The prime symbol is used to represent feet, arcminutes. However, for convenience, a is commonly used, the double prime represents inches, arcseconds, and seconds. However, for convenience, a is commonly used, thus, 3′ 5″ could mean 3 feet and 5 inches or 3 minutes and 5 seconds. As an angular measurement, 3° 5′ 30″ means 3 degrees,5 arcminutes and 30 arcseconds, the triple prime in watchmaking represents a ligne. It is also found in historical astronomical works to denote thirds. Likewise, a quadruple prime denotes fourths, in mathematics, the prime is generally used to generate more variable names for things which are similar, without resorting to subscripts – x′ generally means something related to or derived from x. For example, if a point is represented by the Cartesian coordinates, the prime symbol is not related to prime numbers. Likewise are f ‴ and f ⁗, similarly, if y = f then y′ and y″ are the first and second derivatives of y with respect to x. Set complement, A′ is the complement of the set A, the negation of an event in probability theory, Pr =1 − Pr. The result of a transformation, Tx = x′ The transpose of a matrix, the prime is said to decorate the letter to which it applies. The same convention is adopted in functional programming, particularly in Haskell, in physics, the prime is used to denote variables after an event. For example, vA′ would indicate the velocity of object A after an event and it is also commonly used in relativity, The event at in frame S has coordinates in frame S′. In chemistry, it is used to distinguish between different functional groups connected to an atom in a molecule, such as R and R′, representing different alkyl groups in an organic compound. The carbonyl carbon in proteins is denoted as C′, which distinguishes it from the backbone carbon, the alpha carbon. In molecular biology, the prime is used to denote the positions of carbon on a ring of deoxyribose or ribose, the prime distinguishes places on these two chemicals, rather than places on other parts of DNA or RNA, like phosphate groups or nucleic acids. The chemistry of this demands that the 3 prime OH is extended by DNA synthesis
Prime (symbol)
–
Prime, double prime and triple prime
12.
Tilde
–
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in came from the Latin titulus. The reason for the name was that it was written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a mark of suspension. Thus the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to Ao Dñi, such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the labour and the cost of vellum. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks and other abbreviations, the tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ◌̃ Combining Tilde and U+007E ~ Tilde, in lexicography, the latter kind of tilde and the swung dash are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word. This symbol informally means approximately, about, or around, such as ~30 minutes before and it can mean similar to, including of the same order of magnitude as, such as, x ~ y meaning that x and y are of the same order of magnitude. The tilde is used to indicate equal to or approximately equal to by placing it over the = symbol, like so. The text of the Domesday Book of 1086, relating for example, the text with abbreviations expanded is as follows, Mollande tempore regis Edwardi geldabat pro iiii hidis et uno ferling. In dominio sunt iii carucae et x servi et xxx villani et xx bordarii cum xvi carucis, ibi xii acrae prati et xv acrae silvae. Pastura iii leugae in longitudine et latitudine, elwardus tenebat tempore regis Edwardi pro manerio et geldabat pro dimidia hida. Ibi sunt v villani cum i servo, valet xx solidos ad pensam et arsuram. Eidem manerio est injuste adjuncta Nimete et valet xv solidos, ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de Hundredis Nortmoltone et Badentone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarum. The incorporation of the tilde into ASCII is a result of its appearance as a distinct character on mechanical typewriters in the late nineteenth century. Any good typewriter store had a catalog of alternative keyboards that could be specified for machines ordered from the factory, at that time, the tilde was used only in Spanish and Portuguese typewriters. In Modern Spanish, the tilde is used only with n and N, both were conveniently assigned to a single mechanical typebar, which sacrificed a key that was felt to be less important, usually the 1⁄2— 1⁄4 key. Portuguese, however, uses not ñ but nh and it uses the tilde on the vowels a and o
Tilde
–
Text of Exeter
Domesday Book of 1086
Tilde
–
Carta marina showing Finnish economy, with the captions Hic fabricantur naves and Hic fabricantur
bombarde abbreviated
13.
Arabic diacritics
–
The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, including ijam ⟨إِعْجَام⟩, and tashkil ⟨تَشْكِيل⟩. The latter include the ḥarakāt ⟨حَرَكَات⟩, the Arabic script is an impure abjad, where short consonants and long vowels are represented by letters but short vowels and consonant length are not generally indicated in writing. Tashkīl is optional to represent missing vowels and consonant length, modern Arabic is also written without consonant pointing, but some books are written with consonant pointing such as books for Arabic learners and childrens books. The literal meaning of tashkīl is forming and it serves the same purpose as furigana in Japanese or pinyin or zhuyin in Mandarin Chinese for children who are learning to read or foreign learners. The bulk of Arabic script is written without ḥarakāt, however, they are commonly used in texts that demand strict adherence to exact wording. This is true, primarily, of the Quran ⟨الْقُرْآن⟩ and poetry and it is also quite common to add ḥarakāt to hadiths ⟨الْحَدِيث⟩ and the Bible. Another use is in childrens literature, moreover, ḥarakāt are used in ordinary texts in individual words when an ambiguity of pronunciation cannot easily be resolved from context alone. Arabic dictionaries with vowel marks provide information about the pronunciation to both native and foreign Arabic speakers. In art and calligraphy, ḥarakāt might be used simply because their writing is considered aesthetically pleasing, an example of a fully vocalised Arabic from the Basmala, بِسْمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحْمٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِBismi Llāhi r-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Some Arabic textbooks for foreigners now use ḥarakāt as a guide to make learning reading Arabic easier. The other method used in textbooks is phonetic romanisation of unvocalised texts, fully vocalised Arabic texts are sought after by learners of Arabic. Some online bilingual dictionaries also provide ḥarakāt as a phonetic guide similarly to English dictionaries providing transcription, the ḥarakāt, which literally means motions, are the short vowel marks. There is some ambiguity as to which tashkīl are also ḥarakāt, the fatḥah ⟨فَتْحَة⟩ is a small diagonal line placed above a letter, and represents a short /a/. The word fatḥah itself means opening and refers to the opening of the mouth when producing an /a/, for example, with dāl, ⟨دَ⟩ /da/. When a fatḥah is placed before the letter ⟨ا⟩, it represents a long /aː/, the fatḥah is not usually written in such cases. When a kasrah is placed before the letter ⟨ﻱ⟩, it represents a long /iː/, the kasrah is usually not written in such cases, but if yā’ is pronounced as a diphthong /eɪ/, fatḥah should be written on the preceding consonant to avoid mispronunciation. The ḍammah ⟨ضَمَّة⟩ is a small curl-like diacritic placed above a letter to represent a short /u/, when a ḍammah is placed before the letter ⟨و⟩, it represents a long /uː/. The ḍammah is usually not written in such cases, but if wāw is pronounced as a diphthong /aw/, the maddah ⟨مَدَّة⟩ is a tilde-like diacritic, which can appear mostly on top of an alif and indicates a glottal stop /ʔ/ followed by a long /aː/
Arabic diacritics
–
7th-century
kufic script without either ḥarakāt or i‘jām.
Arabic diacritics
–
Middle Kufic
Arabic diacritics
–
Modern Kufic in Qur'an
14.
Early Cyrillic alphabet
–
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system that was developed during the late ninth century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Orthodox Slavic population in Europe. It was developed in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire in order to write the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Cyrillic script is used primarily for Slavic languages. The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures, the Glagolitic alphabet was created by the monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid of his brother Saint Methodius, around 863. One possibility is that this systematization of Cyrillic was undertaken at the Council of Preslav in 893, particularly, this principle is violated by certain vowel letters, which represent plus the vowel if they are not preceded by a consonant. It is also violated by a significant failure to distinguish between /ji/ and /jĭ/ orthographically, there was no distinction of capital and lowercase letters, though manuscript letters were rendered larger for emphasis, or in various decorative initial and nameplate forms. Letters served as numerals as well as signs, the values of the numerals were directly borrowed from their Greek-letter analogues. Letters without Greek equivalents mostly had no numeral values, whereas one letter, since its creation, the Cyrillic script has adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages. It has been the subject of academic reforms and political decrees, variations of the Cyrillic script are used to write languages throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. The form of the Russian alphabet underwent a change when Tsar Peter the Great introduced the Civil Script in 1708, some letters and breathing marks which were only used for historical reasons were dropped. Medieval letterforms used in typesetting were harmonized with Latin typesetting practices, exchanging medieval forms for Baroque ones, the reform subsequently influenced Cyrillic orthographies for most other languages. Today, the orthography and typesetting standards only remain in use in Church Slavonic. A comprehensive repertoire of early Cyrillic characters is included in the Unicode since version 5.1 standard and these characters and their distinctive letterforms are represented in specialized computer fonts for Slavistics. In addition to the letters, there were a number of scribal variations, combining ligatures. Each letter had a numeric value also, inherited from the corresponding Greek letter, a titlo over a sequence of letters indicated their use as a number, usually this was accompanied by a dot on either side of the letter. In numerals, the place was to the left of the tens place. Thousands are formed using a symbol, ҂, which was attached to the lower left corner of the numeral. Many fonts display this symbol incorrectly as being in line with the letters instead of subscripted below, later manuscripts made increasing use of a different style of abbreviation, in which some of the left-out letters were superscripted above the abbreviation and covered with a pokrytie diacritic
Early Cyrillic alphabet
Early Cyrillic alphabet
–
During the
Middle Ages the Cyrillic Alphabet was known as the
Slavic Alphabet or the
Bulgarian Alphabet.
Early Cyrillic alphabet
–
ℓ 1
Early Cyrillic alphabet
–
ℓ 5
15.
Titlo
–
Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol initially used in early Cyrillic manuscripts, e. g. in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek τίτλος, title, the titlo still appears in inscriptions on modern icons and in service books printed in Church Slavonic. The titlo is drawn as a line over a text. The usual form is short stroke up, falling slanted line, short stroke up, the titlo has several meanings depending on the context, One meaning is in its use to mark letters when they are used as numerals. This is a system analogous to Greek numerals. A titlo is used as a scribal abbreviation mark for frequently written long words. In place of «богъ», for example, «бг҃ъ» was written under the titlo, fig.3 shows a list of the most common of these abbreviations in current use in printed Church Slavonic. Fig.2 shows «Господь» abbreviated to its first letter and stem ending and this corresponds to the Nomina sacra tradition of using contractions for certain frequently occurring names in Greek Scriptures. A short titlo is placed over a letter or over an entire abbreviation. Titlo is encoded in Unicode as U+0483 ◌҃ COMBINING CYRILLIC TITLO, U+FE2E ◌︮ COMBINING CYRILLIC TITLO LEFT HALF, Church Slavonic Keyboard Online The Hirmos Ponomar font for viewing Church Slavonic texts
Titlo
–
Suzdal Kremlin clock
Titlo
–
Frequently used
sigla found in contemporary
Church Slavonic
16.
Hebrew diacritics
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Several diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread system, and the one still used to a significant degree today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium in the Land of Israel. The Niqqud signs and cantillation marks developed by the Masoretes are small compared to consonants, in modern Israeli orthography, vowel and consonant pointing is seldom used, except in specialised texts such as dictionaries, poetry, or texts for children or for new immigrants. Israeli Hebrew has five vowel phonemes—/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, Niqqud distinguish the following vowels and consonants, for more detail, see the main article. Also, they are represented by the same Unicode character. Note 4, notes, These vowels lengths are not manifested in Modern Hebrew. Adding two vertical dots ְ to the short-vowel diacritic produces the diacritic for very short vowel, the short /o/ and long /a/ are represented by the same diacritic. The short /o/ is usually promoted to a long /o/ in Israeli writing for the sake of disambiguation, the short /u/ is usually promoted to a long /u/ in Israeli writing for the sake of disambiguation. Meteg is a bar placed below a character next to the niqqud for various purposes, including marking vowel length. Its shape is identical to the cantillation mark sof pasuq, Geresh is a mark, ⟨׳⟩ that may be used as a diacritic, as a punctuation mark for initialisms, or as a marker of Hebrew numerals. It is also used in cantillation, gershayim between the penultimate and last letters marks acronyms, alphabetic numerals, names of Hebrew letters, linguistic roots and, in older texts, transcriptions of foreign words. Placed above a letter it is one of the cantillation marks and this assertion was hotly contested by Swiss theologian Johannes Buxtorf II in 1648. Brian Waltons 1657 polyglot bible followed Cappel in revising the vowel points, in 1675, the 2nd and 3rd canons of the so-called Helvetic Consensus of the Swiss Reformed Church confirmed Buxtorfs view as orthodox and affirmed that the vowel points were inspired. In masoretic manuscripts and some older texts the soft fricative consonants. A free online course to learn the Hebrew Vowel System Rules for Spelling without Niqqud - a simplified version of the Rules, published on the Academy of the Hebrew Language website. Gesenius Hebrew Grammar, §5m for usage of Geresh in abbreviations, §7, §8, §9, §10 for vowel signs, §12, §13, §14 for Dagesh, Mappiq and Rafe, §15, §16 for the cantillation signs and Maqqeph. Hebrew tutorial on how to use diacritics in Word
Hebrew diacritics
–
Gen. 1:9 And God said, "Let the waters be collected". Letters in black,
pointing in red,
cantillation in blue
17.
Brahmic scripts
–
The Brahmic scripts are a family of abugida or alphabet writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia, and were used in Japan. They are used by languages of several families, Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Mongolic, Austroasiatic, Austronesian. They were also the source of the order of Japanese kana. Brahmic scripts descended from the Brahmi script, the most reliable of these were short Brahmi inscriptions dated to the 4th century BC and published by Coningham et al. Northern Brahmi gave rise to the Gupta script during the Gupta period, the Siddhaṃ script was especially important in Buddhism, as many sutras were written in it. The art of Siddham calligraphy survives today in Japan, the syllabic nature and dictionary order of the modern kana system of Japanese writing is believed to be descended from the Indic scripts, most likely through the spread of Buddhism. Southern Brahmi evolved into Old-Kannada, Pallava and Vatteluttu scripts, which in turn diversified into other scripts of South India, Bhattiprolu was a great centre of Buddhism during 3rd century BCE and from where Buddhism spread to east Asia. The present Telugu script is derived from Bhattiprolu Script or Kannada-Telugu script or Kadamba script, also known as old Telugu script, owing to its similarity to the same. Initially, minor changes were made which is now called Tamil Brahmi which has far fewer letters than some of the other Indic scripts as it has no separate aspirated or voiced consonants. Some characteristics, which are present in most but not all the scripts, are, other vowels are written by adding to the character. A mark, known in Sanskrit as a virama/halant can be used to indicate the absence of an inherent vowel, Each vowel has two forms, an independent form when not part of a consonant, and a dependent form, when attached to a consonant. Depending on the script, the dependent forms can be placed to the left of, to the right of, above, below. Consonants can be combined in ligatures, special marks are added to denote the combination of r with another consonant. Nasalization and aspiration of a dependent vowel is also noted by separate signs. The alphabetical order is, vowels, velar consonants, palatal consonants, retroflex consonants, dental consonants, bilabial consonants, approximants, sibilants, Each consonant grouping had four stops, and a nasal consonant. Below are comparison charts of several of the major Indic scripts, accordingly, The charts are not comprehensive. Glyphs may be unrepresented if they dont derive from any Brahmi character, the pronunciations of glyphs in the same column may not be identical
Brahmic scripts
–
Calligraphy
Brahmic scripts
–
Spread of Brahmic family of scripts from India.
Brahmic scripts
–
A fragment of
Ashoka's 6th pillar edict.
18.
Visarga
–
In Sanskrit phonology, visarga is the name of a phone, written as, Visarga is an allophone of /r/ and /s/ in pausa. Since /-s/ is an inflectional suffix, visarga appears frequently in Sanskrit texts. In the traditional order of Sanskrit sounds, visarga and anusvāra appear between vowels and stop consonants, the precise pronunciation of visarga in Vedic texts may vary between Śākhās. Some pronounce a slight echo of the vowel after the fricative, aḥ will be pronounced. The visarga is commonly found in writing, resembling the punctuation mark of colon or as two tiny circles one above the other and this form is retained by most Indian scripts. According to Sanskrit phonologists, the visarga has two allophones, namely जिह्वामूलीय and उपध्मानीय. The former may be pronounced before ⟨क⟩, ⟨ख⟩, and the latter before ⟨प⟩, and ⟨फ⟩, as in तव पितामहः कः, पक्षिणः खे उड्डयन्ते, भोः पाहि, and तपःफलम्. Both of them are written as two crescent-shaped semi-circles one above the other, facing the top and bottom respectively, distinct signs for Jihavamuliya and Upadhmania exists in Kannada, Tibetan, Sharada, Brahmi and Lantsa scripts. In the Burmese alphabet, the visarga, when used with joined to a letter, motoori Norinaga invented a mark for visarga which he used in a book about Indian orthography
Visarga
–
The Visarga mark used by Motoori.
19.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
The official chart of the IPA as of 2005. Click to enlarge. The proper symbols for upstep and downstep are not available in this font, and have been substituted.
International Phonetic Alphabet
–
X-ray photos show the sounds [i, u, a, ɑ]
20.
Khmer alphabet
–
The Khmer alphabet or Khmer script is an abugida script used to write the Khmer language. It is also used to write Pali in the Buddhist liturgy of Cambodia and it was adapted from the Pallava script, a variant of the Grantha alphabet descended from the Brahmi script, which was used in southern India and South East Asia during the 5th and 6th centuries AD. The oldest dated inscription in Khmer was found at Angkor Borei District in Takéo Province south of Phnom Penh, the modern Khmer script differs somewhat from precedent forms seen on the inscriptions of the ruins of Angkor. The Thai and Lao scripts are descended from a form of the Khmer script. Khmer is written left to right. Words within the sentence or phrase are generally run together with no spaces between them. Consonant clusters within a word are stacked, with the consonant being written in reduced form under the main consonant. Originally there were 35 consonant characters, but modern Khmer uses only 33, each such character in fact represents a consonant sound together with an inherent vowel – either â or ô. Most dependent vowels have two different pronunciations, depending in most cases on the inherent vowel of the consonant to which they are added, in some positions, a consonant written with no dependent vowel is taken to be followed by the sound of its inherent vowel. There are also a number of used to indicate further modifications in pronunciation. The script also includes its own numerals and punctuation marks, there are 35 Khmer consonant symbols, although modern Khmer only uses 33, two having become obsolete. Each consonant has an inherent vowel, â /ɑː/ or ô /ɔː/, equivalently, a consonants series determines the pronunciation of the dependent vowel symbols which may be attached to it, and in some positions the sound of the inherent vowel is itself pronounced. Each consonant, with one exception, also has a subscript form and these may also be called sub-consonants, the Khmer phrase is ជើងអក្សរ cheung âksâr, meaning foot of a letter. Most subscript consonants resemble the corresponding consonant symbol, but in a smaller and possibly simplified form, most subscript consonants are written directly below other consonants, although subscript r appears to the left, while a few others have ascending elements which appear to the right. Subscripts are used in writing consonant clusters, clusters in Khmer normally consist of two consonants, although occasionally in the middle of a word there will be three. The first consonant in a cluster is written using the main consonant symbol, subscripts were previously also used to write final consonants, in modern Khmer this may be done, optionally, in some words ending -ng or -y, such as ឲ្យ aôy. The consonants and their forms are listed in the following table. Usual phonetic values are given using the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations are described below the table, the sound system is described in detail at Khmer phonology
Khmer alphabet
–
Ancient Khmer script engraved on stone.
Khmer alphabet
–
Âksâr khâm (អក្សរខម, Aksar Khom), an antique style of the Khmer script as written in Uttaradit, Thailand. In this picture, although it was written with Khmer script, all texts in this manuscript are in Thai languages.
21.
Syriac alphabet
–
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. Syriac is written right to left. It is a script where some, but not all. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the vowel sounds are supplied either by the readers memory or by optional diacritic marks. In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a similar to Hebrew. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni, Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers. There are three variants of the Syriac alphabet, ʾEsṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, and Serṭā. The oldest and classical form of the alphabet is ʾEsṭrangēlā, although ʾEsṭrangēlā is no longer used as the main script for writing Syriac, it has received some revival since the 10th century. It is often used in publications, in titles and inscriptions. In some older manuscripts and inscriptions it is possible for any letter to join to the left, vowel marks are usually not used with ʾEsṭrangēlā. The East Syriac dialect is written in the Maḏnḥāyā form of the alphabet. Other names for the script include Swāḏāyā, ʾĀṯūrāyā, Kaldāyā, the Eastern script resembles ʾEsṭrangēlā more closely than the Western script, being somewhat a midway point between the two. Some transliteration schemes find its inclusion necessary for showing spirantization or for historical reasons, whether because its distribution is mostly predictable or because its pronunciation was lost, neither the East nor West variants of the alphabet have a sign to represent the schwa. The West Syriac dialect is written in the Serṭā form of the alphabet, also known as the Pšīṭā, Maronite. Most of the letters are derived from ʾEsṭrangēlā, but are simplified. A cursive, chancery hand is evidenced in the earliest Syriac manuscripts, from the 8th century, the simpler Serṭā style came into fashion, perhaps because of its more economical use of parchment. The Nabataean alphabet was based on this form of Syriac handwriting, lowercase Omega, used only in the vocative interjection ʾō
Syriac alphabet
–
Estrangela alphabet
Syriac alphabet
–
11th century book in Syriac Serṭā.
Syriac alphabet
–
Isho or Eesho, the
Aramaic name of
Jesus
22.
Thai alphabet
–
Thai script is used to write the Thai language and other languages in Thailand. It has 44 consonant letters,15 vowel symbols that combine into at least 28 vowel forms, and four tone diacritics. Although commonly referred to as the Thai alphabet, the script is in not a true alphabet but an abugida. In the case of the Thai script this is an implied a or o, consonants are written horizontally from left to right, with vowels arranged above, below, to the left, or to the right of the corresponding consonant, or in a combination of positions. Thai has its own set of Thai numerals that are based on the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, the Thai alphabet is derived from the Old Khmer script, which is a southern Brahmic style of writing derived from the south Indian Pallava alphabet. Although Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages have distinctive tones in their phonological system, thus, tone markers are an innovation in the Thai language that later influenced other related Tai languages and some Tibeto-Burman languages on the Southeast Asian mainland. Thai tradition attributes the creation of the script to King Ramkhamhaeng the Great in 1283, there is a fairly complex relationship between spelling and sound. There are various issues, For many consonant sounds, there are two different letters that represent the same sound, but which cause a different tone to be associated. This stems from a change that occurred historically in the phonology of the Thai language. At the time the Thai script was created, the language had three tones and a set of contrasts between voiced and unvoiced consonants at the beginning of a syllable. Thai borrowed a number of words from Sanskrit and Pali. This means that the Thai alphabet has a number of letters that represent separate sounds in Sanskrit and Pali. These are mostly or exclusively used in Sanskrit and Pali borrowings, moreover, many consonants from Sanskrit and Pali loanwords are generally silent. The spelling of the words resembles Sanskrit or Pali orthography, Thai สามารถ to be able Thai จันทร์ moon Thai letters do not have small, spaces between words are not used, except in certain linguistically motivated cases. Minor pauses in sentences may be marked by a comma, and major pauses by a period, a birds eye ๏ formerly indicated paragraphs, but is now obsolete. A kho mut ๛ can be used to mark the end of a chapter or document, Thai writing also uses quotation marks and parentheses, but not square brackets or braces. There are 44 consonant letters representing 21 distinct consonant sounds, there are in addition four consonant-vowel combination characters not included in the tally of 44. Consonants are divided into three classes — in alphabetic order these are high and low class — as shown in the table below
Thai alphabet
–
Replica of the Ramkhamhaeng inscription, the oldest inscription using proto-Thai script
A sample extract of Icelandic.
