A caron ( ˇ ) or háček (pronounced [ˈhɑːʧɛk]; [ˈɦaːʧɛk]), 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. Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Example of a letter with a diacritic A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... Iotation is a form of palatalisation which occurs in Slavic languages. ... Postalveolar (or palato-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge (the place of articulation for alveolar consonants) and the palate (the place of articulation for palatal consonants). ... The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. ...  Countries where a West Slavic language is the national language  Countries where an East Slavic language is the national language  Countries where a South Slavic language is the national language The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup... Geographical distribution of Finno-Ugric (Finno-Permic in blue, Ugric in green). ...

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. A breve (Latin brevis short, brief) is a diacritical mark Ë˜, shaped like a little round cup, designed to indicate a short vowel, as opposed to the macron Â¯ which indicates long vowels. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a caret, a hat or an uppen) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans and other languages, and formerly in Turkish [citation needed]. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent...

The left (downward) stroke is usually thicker than the right (upward) stroke in serif typefaces. In typography, serifs are non-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. ...

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 Unicode characters (e.g., "Latin capital letter Z with caron"). Its earliest known use was in computing references in the mid-1980s.^[1] Its actual origin remains obscure, but some have suggested that it may derive from a fusion of caret and macron. Though this may be folk-etymology, it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions. The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... A caret in the Arial font Caret is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other character sets. ... A macron, from Greek (makros) meaning large, is a diacritic ¯ placed over a vowel originally to indicate that the vowel is long. ... Folk etymology is a term used in two distinct ways: A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology. ...

The name háček appears in most English dictionaries; the Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest citation as 1953. In Czech, háček means "little hook", the diminutive form of hák. The Czech plural form is háčky. The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is the most successful dictionary of the English language, (not to be confused with the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, formerly New Oxford Dictionary of English, of...

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. Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... The roofs of Olomouc, Czech Republic. ... Serbian (; ) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs in the Serbian diaspora. ...

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. When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the middle dot ·, or to the glyphs combining dot above ̇ and combining dot below ̣ which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Eastern European languages and Vietnamese. ... Czech orthography is a system of rules for correct writing (orthography) in the Czech language. ... The acute accent (   ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ... Jan Hus ( ) (IPA: , alternative spellings John Hus, Jan Huss, John Huss) (c. ... Events End of the reign of Emperor Go-Komatsu of Japan. ... Languages Croatian Religions Predominantly Roman Catholic Related ethnic groups Slavs South Slavs Croats (Croatian: Hrvati) are a South Slavic people mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. ... Languages Bosnian Religions Predominantly Islam Related ethnic groups Slavs (South Slavs) The Bosniaks or Bosniacs[1] (Bosnian: BoÅ¡njaci, IPA: ) are a South Slavic people, living mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) and the Sandžak region of Serbia and Montenegro, with a smaller autochthonous population also present in Croatia... Languages Serbian Religions Predominantly Serbian Orthodox Christian Related ethnic groups Other Slavic peoples, especially South Slavs See Cognate peoples below (* many Serbs opted for Yugoslav ethnicity) [27] Serbs (Serbian: Срби or Srbi) are a South Slavic people who live mainly in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, to a lesser extent, in... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is an alphabet used for several East and South Slavic languages; (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... The Sorbs are a Slavic minority indigenous to the region known as Lusatia in the current German states of Saxony and Brandenburg (in former GDR territory). ... The Łacinka alphabet (лацінка) is the variant of the Latin alphabet which was used for writing the Belarusian language. ...

For the fricatives š [ʃ], ž [ʒ], and the affricate č [tʃ] 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 Karelian language is a variety closely related to Finnish, with which it is not necessarily mutually intelligible. ... Sami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken in parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. ...

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 Romany alphabet (Romani Å¡ib) is the official standard alphabet for writing the Romany language, in all of its many dialects. ... The Faggin-Nazzi writing system is an orthographic system proposed to write the Friulian language, named after its creators, Gianni Nazzi and Giorgio Faggin. ... This article includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ...

The caron is also often used as a diacritical mark on consonants for romanization of text from non-Latin writing systems, particularly in the scientific transliteration of Slavic languages (a method used in linguistics, based on the Croatian alphabet). Philologists—and the standard Finnish orthography—often prefer using it to express the sounds that in English require a digraph (sh, ch, and zh) because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell these sounds (the key exceptions are Polish sz and cz). Its use for this purpose can even be found in America, because certain atlases use it in romanization of foreign place names. The Italian Wikipedia has an article about Karkemiš, 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. Languages can be romanized in a variety of ways, as shown here with Mandarin Chinese In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language... This page meets Wikipedias criteria for speedy deletion. ... The Croatian alphabet is a modified and extended version of the Latin alphabet which is used in Croatian language. ... Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Atlas An atlas is a collection of maps or manifolds, traditionally bound into book form, but also found in multimedia formats. ... In geography and cartography, a toponym is a place name, a geographical name, a proper name of locality, region, or some other part of Earths surface or its natural or artificial feature. ... The Arzhang is the holy book of Manichaeism, written and illustrated by its prophet Mani. ... ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ...

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. Pinyin, more formally called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ), is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ...

The caron in IPA represents a rising tone. It is used in Americanist phonetic notation as a diacritic to indicate various types of pronunciation. IPA may refer to: The International Phonetic Alphabet or India Pale Ale ... Americanist phonetic notation (also Americanist Phonetic Alphabet, American Phonetic Alphabet, sometimes abbreviated APA) is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and Euro-American anthropologists and language scientists (former Neo-grammarians) for the phonetic and phonemic transcription of Native American and European languages. ...

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). For the prime symbol (′) used for feet and inches, see Prime (symbol). ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Geographical distribution of Finno-Ugric (Finno-Permic in blue, Ugric in green). ... The Vyronian language (võro kiil) is a language belonging to the Baltic-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. ... The Karelian language is a variety closely related to Finnish, with which it is not necessarily mutually intelligible. ... The acute accent (   ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ...

List of letters

A complete list of Czech and Slovak letters and digraphs with the háček/caron: Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

• Č/č (pronounced /ʧ/ — similar to 'ch' in cheap, e.g. Československo which means Czechoslovakia)
• Š/š (pronounced /ʃ/ — similar to 'sh' in she, e.g. in Škoda listen (help· info))
• Ž/ž (pronounced /ʒ/ — similar to 's' in treasure, e.g. žal which means "sorrow")
• Ř/ř (only in Czech: special fricative trill /r̝/, transcribed as /ɼ/ in pre-1989 IPA, pronounced roughly as a compound of trilled /r/ and /ʒ/, e.g. Antonín Dvořák listen  (help· info))
• Ď/ď,Ť/ť, Ň/ň (palatals, pronounced /ɟ/, /c/, /ɲ/, slightly different from palatalized consonants as found in Russian): "Ďábel a sťatý kůň" which means "The Devil and a beheaded horse")
• Ľ/ľ (only in Slovak: pronounced as palatal /ʎ/: "podnikateľ" means "businessman")
• Dž/dž (considered a letter in Slovak but a digraph in Czech: pronounced /ʤ/ džungle means "jungle" - almost identical to the "j" sound in jungle and the "g" sound in genius. Somewhat rare)
• Ě/ě (only in Czech) indicates mostly palatalization of preceding consonant: "dě", "tě", "ně" is pronounced /ɟɛ/, /cɛ/, /ɲɛ/; but "mě" are /mɲɛ/, "bě", "pě", "vě" are /bjɛ/, /pjɛ/, /vjɛ/

A complete list of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian letters and digraphs with the háček/caron: ÄŒ in upper- and lowercase ÄŒ is the fourth letter of the Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak and Slovenian alphabet and the fifth letter of the Lithuanian and Latvian alphabet. ... Å  in upper- and lowercase The grapheme Å , Å¡ (Latin S with háček) is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative . ... Å koda can refer to: Å koda Auto - the leading automobile manufacturer in the Czech Republic, now part of the Volkswagen Group Å koda Works - the biggest industrial enterprise in Austria-Hungary, then Czechoslovakia and now Czech Republic Pity As an interesting aside, Å koda (i. ... Image File history File links Cs-Skoda. ... Ž (minuscule: ž) is: the 25th letter of the Slovenian alphabet, the 30th letter of the Serbian; the 42nd letter of the Czech; the 19th letter of the Estonian; the 33rd letter of the Latvian; the 32nd letter of the Lithuanian; the 46th letter of Slovak; the 13th letter of the Turkmen... Antonín Leopold Dvořák ( ; September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, who employed the idioms and melodies of the folk music of his native Bohemiaand Moravia in symphonic, oratorial, chamber and operatic works. ... Image File history File links Cs-Antonin Dvorak. ... Ç… (lowercase dž) is the seventh letter of the Croatian and Serbian (Latin form) alphabets, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced as . ... Lower Sorbian (dolnoserbšćina) is a Slavic minority language spoken in eastern Germany in the historical province of Lower Lusatia, today part of Brandenburg. ... Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbsce) is a minority language of Germany spoken in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, today part of Saxony. ...

• Č/č (pronounced /ʧ/) — similar to 'ch' in cheap
• Š/š (pronounced /ʃ/) — similar to 'sh' in she
• Ž/ž (pronounced /ʒ/) — similar to 's' in treasure
• Ř/ř (only in Upper Sorbian: pronounced /ʃ/) - similar to 'sh' in she
• Tř/tř (only in Upper Sorbian) - soft 'ts' sound
• Ě/ě (pronounced /e/) - similar to 'e' in bed

Of the Baltic and Slavic languages, Serbian (latin alphabet), Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. The digraph Dž/dž is also used in these languages, but only considered a separate letter in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. The Belarusian Lacinka alphabet also contains the digraph (as a separate letter), and latin transctiptions of Bulgarian and Macedonian may also use them at times for transcription of the letter-combination ДЖ (Bulgarian) and the letter Џ (Macedonian). Serbian (; ) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs in the Serbian diaspora. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ...

Of the Finno-Ugric languages, Estonian (and transcriptions to Finnish) use Š/š and Ž/ž, and Karelian and some Sami languages use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž — Dž is not a separate letter. (Skolt Sami has more, see below.) The presence of Č is because it may be phonemically geminate: in Karelian, the phoneme 'čč' is found, and is distinct from 'č', which is not the case in Finnish or Estonian, where only one length is recognized for 'tš'. (Incidentally, in transcriptions, the Finnish orthography has to employ complicated notations like mettšä or even the mettshä to express Karelian meččä.) On some Finnish keyboards, it is possible to write these letters by typing s or z while holding right Alt key or AltGr key. Approximate geographical distribution of areas where indigenous Finno-Ugric languages are spoken. ... The Karelian language is a variety closely related to Finnish, with which it is not necessarily mutually intelligible. ... Sami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken in parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. ... In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is doubled, so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a single consonant. ... The Alt key on a modern Windows keyboard The Alt key on an IBM PC keyboard is the key located immediately to either side of the Space bar, used to change (alternate) the function of other pressed keys. ... AltGr is a modifier key on PC keyboards used to type many characters, primarily ones that are unusual for the locale of the keyboard layout, such as foreign currency symbols and accented letters. ...

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. Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... For the prime symbol (′) used for feet and inches, see Prime (symbol). ... A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1. ...

Skolt Sami uses Ʒ/ʒ (ezh) to mark the alveolar affricate [dz], thus Ǯ/ǯ (ezh-caron or edzh (edge)) marks the postalveolar affricate [dʒ]. In addition to Č, Š, Ž and Ǯ, Skolt Sami also uses the caron – inconsistently – to mark the palatal stops Ǧ [ɟ] and Ǩ [c]. More often than not, these are geminated, e.g. vuäǯǯad "to get". Skolt Sami (Sää´mÇ©iõll) is a Finno-Ugric, Sami language spoken in Finland and nearby parts of Russia. ...

Other uses

The caron is also used in Mandarin Chinese pinyin romanization and orthographies of several other tonal languages to indicate the "falling-rising" tone (third tone in Mandarin). The caron can be placed over the vowels ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ. This article is on all of the Northern and Southwestern Chinese dialects. ... Pinyin, more formally called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ), is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... It has been suggested that Tonal language be merged into this article or section. ...

The caron is used in the New Transliteration System of D'ni in the symbol š to represent the sound [ʃ] ("sh"). Myst franchise Games and their Ages Novels Book of Atrus Book of Tiana Book of Dni Book of Marrim Comic Books #0   #1 Miscellaneous Dni   Dni Ages   The Art   Timeline   Items   Kings   Language   Numerals   People   Wildlife   Organizations Brøderbund   Cyan   Presto   Ubisoft   DRC Note: Fictional details... Myst franchise Games and their Ages Novels Book of Atrus Book of Tiana Book of Dni Book of Marrim Comic Books #0   #1 Miscellaneous Dni   Dni Ages   The Art   Timeline   Items   Kings   Language   Numerals   People   Wildlife   Organizations Brøderbund   Cyan   Presto   Ubisoft   DRC Note: Fictional details...

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. The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

Software

Unicode

For legacy reasons most letters which can carry carons exist as precomposed characters 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: b̌ q̌. Precomposed character is a Unicode entity that can be decomposed into a canonically equivalent string of several other characters. ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ... Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ...

TeX

In TeX, a caron can be inserted using the control sequence v in text, or check in mathematics. For example: TeX (IPA: as in Greek, often in English; written with a lowercase e in imitation of the logo) is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ...

$check{x}$

Special arrangement is necessary to get the alternate versions of the háček above l, d and t, such as (in LaTeX) usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, or usepackage[czech]{babel}. This article is about the typesetting system. ...

Macintosh

On Mac OS X's U.S. Extended and Irish Extended keyboard layouts, the caron is typed by pressing option+v+(letter). Mac OS X (IPA: ) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. ... The Option key The Option key, known to latent PC users as Alt key, is a modifier key present on Apple keyboards. ...

Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word, you can usually find letters with carons by clicking Insert → Symbol → Symbols. Select "(normal text)". Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. ...

XFree86 and X.Org

In recent versions of XFree86/X.Org servers, letters with carons can be typed as a compose sequence <compose> c <letter>, e.g. pressing compose-key c e yields the letter ě. XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System . ... The X.Org Server (officially the ) is the official reference implementation of the X Window System. ... The compose key and compose LED on a Sun Type 5, 6 and 7 keyboards is the second-last key on the bottom row The compose key on a DEC LK201 keyboard is the leftmost key on the bottom row On some computer systems, a compose key is a key...

References

See also

• Breve
• Caret
• Acute accent
• Circumflex accent
• Apostrophe
• Caron Foundation