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A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"), from διακρίνω (diakrínō, "to distinguish"). The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in ...
Diacritical Marks, also known as 'diacritics', are orthographical characters that indicate a special phonetic quality for a given character. They occur mostly in foreign languages. But in English a fair number of imported terms have diacritical marks". ^ a b Burchfield, R.W. (1996). Fowlers's Modern English Usage (3 ed.).
Some English words have diacritics. The form preferred by most English-language sources is commonly used. Sources typically keep the diacritical marks when they make a crucial difference to pronunciation or help avoid confusion. Often sources are divided and both forms are considered acceptable, as is the case with café .
Diaeresis[a] (/ daɪˈɛrəsɪs, - ˈɪər -/ dy-ERR-ə-siss, -EER-) [1] is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as used to indicate the separation of two distinct vowel letters in adjacent syllables when an instance of diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a digraph or diphthong. It consists of a two dots ...
Monotonic orthography for Modern Greek uses only two diacritics, the tonos and diaeresis (sometimes used in combination) that have significance in pronunciation, similar to vowels in Spanish. Initial /h/ is no longer pronounced, and so the rough and smooth breathings are no longer necessary.
The diacritic used to mark this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the over-cross, U+033D ̽ COMBINING X ABOVE. In most languages, vowels become mid-centralized when spoken quickly, and in some languages, such as English and Russian, many vowels are also mid-centralized when unstressed. This is a general characteristic of vowel reduction.
A macron (/ ˈmækrɒn, ˈmeɪ -/ MAK-ron, MAY-) is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel.
Diacritical marks of two dots ¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa.