Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!convex!cs.utexas.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!mcv
From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Diacritic symbol names
Message-ID: <CxyA2x.5K2@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <384b9p$g1v@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 02:40:09 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <384b9p$g1v@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu>,
Hung Jung Lu <hlu@wam.umd.edu> wrote:
>What's the name of the semi-circle opened upwards that one
>finds over the Turkish g (yamushak ge) and the Vietnamese
>vowel a? 

_breve_ (Latin for "short").

>In what other languages is it used? Over what
>letters? 

Romanian has a-breve (phonetic schwa)


If Cyrillic counts, Russian has it over Cyrillic i (|/|), for
final -i in diphthongs, and more generally as a notation for
[j] (Engl. y).

It is used in Latin (and other languages) to mark a short
vowel (as opposed to a long vowel, marked with an overbar
or macron).  You don't normally do that, except in scientific
works or to mark syllable lengths in Latin poetry.  It can
therefore stand on any a, e, i, o or u.

>Are there well-established names for diacritic symbols?
>(At least "tilde" seem to be widely used name for a 
>particular diacritic symbol ~ . Hat as in ^ is also a relatively
>common name. "Umlaut" is understood at least in English and German
>as the little two dots over u.)
>Is there any reference for the names?
>

You mentioned (La)TeX.  Any reference on it (Knuth at least) 
should give the names of the diacritics supported by TeX.
The Unicode Standard also gives the names ("General Diacritic
Marks" 0300 to 036F).  Other places you might look are 
Adobe Postcript reference manuals, books on typography, 
other typesetting systems (troff, etc.), or a good encyclopaedia.

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
