Information AboutCaron |
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A caron ( ˇ ) or '''háček''' ( Pronounced ; ), also known as a '''wedge''', '''inverted circumflex''', '''inverted hat''', is a Diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical Palatalization , Iotation , or Postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic , Slavic , Finno-Lappic , and other languages. It looks similar to a Breve , but has a sharp tip, like an inverted Circumflex (^), while a breve is rounded. Compare the caron: Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ to the breve: Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ. The left (downward) stroke is usually thicker than the right (upward) stroke in Serif typefaces. The caron is also used as a symbol or modifier in mathematics. NAME AND ETYMOLOGY Usage differs as to the name of this diacritic. In the field of typography, the term ''caron'' seems to be more popular. In linguistics, the tendency is to use ''háček''. The term ''caron'' is used in the official names of and Macron . Though this may be Folk-etymology , it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions. The name ''háček'' appears in most English dictionaries; the ''", the diminutive form of ''hák''. The Czech plural form is ''háčky''. In Slovak it is called ''mäkčeň'' (i.e. "softener" or " Palatalization mark"), in Slovenian ''strešica'' ("little Roof ") or ''kljukica'' ("little hook"), in Croatian and Serbian ''kvaka'' or ''kvačica'' (also "small hook"), ''katus'' ("roof") in Estonian , and ''hattu'' ("hat") in Finnish . USAGE The caron evolved from the Dot Above diacritic, which was introduced into Czech Orthography (along with the Acute Accent ) by Jan Hus in his ''De Ortographia Bohemica'' ( 1412 ). Today the caron is also used by the Slovaks , Slovenians , Croats , Bosniaks ; Serbs and Macedonians (when romanizing the official Cyrillic ); Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs , Lithuanians , Latvians , and Belarusians (formerly in the Łacinka Latin alphabet, now only in romanization of the official Cyrillic). The original form still exists in Polish ''ż''. For the fricatives ''š'' , ''ž'' , and the affricate ''č'' only, the caron is used in the Finno-Lappic languages which use the Latin alphabet, such as Estonian , Finnish , Karelian and some Sami Languages . In Finnish and Estonian, it is limited to transcribing foreign names and loanwords (albeit common loanwords such as ''šekk'' 'cheque'); the sounds (and letters) are native and common in Karelian and Sami. The caron is also used in the Romany Alphabet . The Faggin-Nazzi writing system for the Friulian Language makes use of the caron over the letters ''c'', ''g'', and ''s''. The caron is also often used as a diacritical mark on consonants for , an ancient city in Southeast Asia; the English Wikipedia has an article about Aržang , a holy book. On the typographical side, Š/š and Ž/ž are likely the easiest among non-Western European diacritic characters to adopt for Westerners because the two are part of the Windows-1252 character encoding. It is also used as an accent mark, that is, to indicate a change in the pronunciation of a vowel. The main example is in Pinyin for Chinese , where it represents a falling-rising tone. It is used in transliterations of Thai to indicate a rising tone. The caron in IPA represents a rising tone. It is used in Americanist Phonetic Notation as a diacritic to indicate various types of pronunciation. WRITING AND PRINTING CARONS In printed text, the caron combined with certain letters (lower-case ť, ď, ľ, and upper-case Ľ) is reduced to a small stroke. This only rarely happens in handwritten text. Although the stroke looks similar to an Apostrophe , there is a significant difference in Kerning . Using apostrophe in place of a caron looks very unprofessional though it can be found on goods produced in foreign countries and imported to Slovakia or the Czech Republic (compare t' to ť, L'ahko to Ľahko). (Apostrophes appearing as palatalization marks in some Finnic Languages , such as Võro and Karelian , are not forms of caron either.) Foreigners also sometimes mistake the caron for the Acute Accent (compare Ĺ to Ľ, ĺ to ľ). LIST OF LETTERS A complete list of Czech and Slovak letters and Digraph s with the háček/caron:
A complete list of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian letters and digraphs with the háček/caron:
Of the Baltic and Slavic languages, Macedonian , Serbian , Croatian , Slovenian , Latvian and Lithuanian use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian also use the digraph Dž/dž. The Belarusian Lacinka Alphabet as well as Bulgarian may also use them at times. Of the or AltGr Key . Notice that these are ''not'' Palatalized , but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian ''Nissi'' (palatalized) is distinct from ''nišši'' (postalveolar). Palatalization is typically ignored in spelling, but some Karelian and Võro orthographies use an Apostrophe (') or an acute accent (´). In Finnish and Estonian, ''š'' and ''ž'' (and in Estonian, very rarely ''č'') appear in loanwords and foreign Proper Names only and, when not available, can be substituted with 'h', e.g., 'sh' for 'š', in print. Skolt Sami uses (ezh) to mark the alveolar affricate , thus (ezh-caron or edzh (edge)) marks the postalveolar affricate . In addition to Č, Š, Ž and , Skolt Sami also uses the caron – inconsistently – to mark the palatal stops and . More often than not, these are geminated, e.g. '''' "to get". OTHER USES The caron is also used in Mandarin Chinese Pinyin romanization and orthographies of several other Tonal Language s to indicate the "falling-rising" Tone (third tone in Mandarin). The caron can be placed over the vowels ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ. The caron is used in the New Transliteration System of D'ni in the symbol š to represent the sound {Link without Title} ("sh"). The characters Ě/ě are a part of the Unicode Latin Extended-A set because they occur in Czech, while the rest are in Latin Extended-B, which often causes an inconsistent appearance. SOFTWARE Unicode For legacy reasons most letters which can carry carons exist as Precomposed Character s in Unicode , but a caron can also be added to any letter (often with rather ugly results due to deficiencies in font rendering) by using the Combining character U+030C COMBINING CARON, for example: . TeX In TeX , a caron can be inserted using the control sequence in text, or \check in mathematics. For example:: $\check{x}$ Special arrangement is necessary to get the alternate versions of the háček above l, d and t, such as (in LaTeX ) \usepackage or .Macintosh On Mac OS X 's U.S. Extended and Irish Extended keyboard layouts, the caron is typed by pressing Option +v+(letter). Microsoft Word In Microsoft Word , you can usually find letters with carons by clicking Insert → Symbol → Symbols. Select "(normal text)". XFree86 and X.Org In recent versions of XFree86 / X.Org servers, letters with carons can be typed as a Compose sequence REFERENCES SEE ALSO |
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