Caron
A caron or háček, is a diacritic mark placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
Typographers tend to use the term caron, while linguists prefer the Czech word háček.
The symbol is common in the Baltic, Slavic, Finnic, Samic and Berber language families.
Its use differs according to the orthographic rules of a language. In most Slavic and other European languages it indicates present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar articulation. In Salishan languages, it often represents a uvular consonant. When placed over vowel symbols, the caron can indicate a contour tone, for instance the falling and then rising tone in the Pinyin romanization of Mandarin Chinese. It is also used to decorate symbols in mathematics, where it is often pronounced .
The caron is shaped approximately like a small letter "v". For serif typefaces, the caron generally has one of two forms: either symmetrical, essentially identical to an inverted circumflex; or with the left stroke thicker than the right, like the usual serif form of the letter "v". The latter form is often preferred by Czech designers for use in Czech, while for other uses the symmetrical form tends to predominate, as it does also among sans-serif typefaces.
The caron is not to be confused with the breve :
| Breve | Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ğ ğ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ Y̆ y̆ |
| Caron | Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǧ ǧ Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ Y̌ y̌ |
Names
Different disciplines generally refer to this diacritic mark by different names. Typography tends to use the term caron. Linguistics more often uses the Czech word háček. Pullum's and Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide uses the term wedge.The term caron is used in the official names of Unicode characters. The Unicode Consortium explicitly states that the reason for this is unknown, but its earliest known use was in the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual of 1967, and it was later used in character sets such as DIN 31624, ISO 5426, ISO/IEC 6937 and ISO/IEC 8859-2. 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. A Unicode technical note states that the name "hacek" should have been used instead.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1953 as the earliest appearance in English for háček. In Czech, háček means 'small hook', the diminutive form of hák ". The name appears in most English dictionaries, but they treat the long mark differently. British dictionaries, such as the OED, ODE, CED, write háček in the headwords, while American ones, such as the Merriam-Webster, NOAD, AHD, incorrectly omit the acute and write haček, however, the NOAD gives háček as an alternative spelling.
In Slovak it is called mäkčeň, in Croatian kvaka or kvačica, in Serbian ква̏ка or ква̏чица, in Slovenian strešica or kljukica, in Lithuanian paukščiukas or varnelė, in Estonian katus, in Finnish hattu, and in Lakota ičášleče.
Origin
The caron evolved from the dot above diacritic, which Jan Hus introduced into Czech orthography in his De Orthographia Bohemica. The original form still exists in Polish ż. However, Hus's work was hardly known at that time, and háček became widespread only in the 16th century with the introduction of printing.Usage
For the fricatives š, ž, and the affricate č only, the caron is used in most northwestern Uralic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Karelian, Veps, Northern Sami, and Inari Sami. Estonian and Finnish use š and ž, but only for transcribing foreign names and loanwords ; the sounds are native and common in Karelian, Veps, and Sami.In Italian, š, ž, and č are routinely used as in Slovenian to transcribe Slavic names in the Cyrillic script since in native Italian words, the sounds represented by these letters must be followed by a vowel, and Italian uses ch for, not. Other Romance languages, by contrast, tend to use their own orthographies, or in a few cases such as Spanish, borrow English sh or zh.
The caron is also used in the Romany alphabet. The Faggin-Nazzi writing system for Friulian 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 romanization of text from non-Latin writing systems, particularly in the scientific transliteration of Slavic languages. Philologists and the standard Finnish orthography often prefer using it to express sounds for which English require a digraph because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell the sounds. Its use for that purpose can even be found in the United States because certain atlases use it in romanization of foreign place names. 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.
Esperanto uses the circumflex over c, g, h, j, and s in similar ways; the circumflex was chosen because there was no caron on most Western European typewriters, but the circumflex existed on French ones.
It is also used as an accent mark on vowels to indicate the tone of a syllable. The main example is in Pinyin for Chinese in which it represents a falling-rising tone. It is used in transliterations of Thai to indicate a rising tone.
Phonetics
The caron represents a rising tone in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet for indicating postalveolar consonants and in Americanist phonetic notation to indicate various types of pronunciation.The caron below represents voicing.
Writing and printing carons
In printed Czech and Slovak text, the caron combined with certain letters is reduced to a small stroke or apostrophe. That is optional in handwritten text. Latin fonts are typically set to display this way by default. In some applications, using the combining grapheme joiner, U+034F, between the letter and the combining mark, as in t͏̌, d͏̌, l͏̌, may prevent the caron from looking like a small stroke of the canonical characters.In Lazuri orthography, the lower-case k with caron sometimes has its caron reduced to a stroke while the lower-case t with caron preserves its caron shape.
Although the stroke looks similar to an apostrophe, the kerning is significantly different. Using an apostrophe in place of a caron can be perceived as very unprofessional, but it is still often found on imported goods meant for sale in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Foreigners also sometimes mistake the caron for the acute accent.
In Balto-Slavic languages
The following are the Czech and Slovak letters and digraphs with the caron :- Č/č
- Š/š
- Ž/ž
- Ř/ř
- Ď/ď, Ť/ť, Ň/ň
- Ľ/ľ
- DŽ/Dž/dž
- Ě/ě indicates mostly palatalization of preceding consonant:
- * dě, tě, ně are,, ;
- * but mě is or, and bě, pě, vě, fě are.
- Furthermore, until the 19th century, Ǧ/ǧ was used to represent while G/g was used to represent.
- Č/č
- Š/š
- Ž/ž
- Ř/ř
- Tř/tř
- Ě/ě
In Uralic languages
In the Finnic languages, Estonian uses Š/š and Ž/ž, and Karelian uses Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. Dž is not a separate letter. Č is present 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, for which only one length is recognized for 'tš'. On some Finnish keyboards, it is possible to write those letters by typing s or z while holding right Alt key or AltGr key, though that is not supported by the Microsoft Windows keyboard device driver KBDFI.DLL for the Finnish language. The Finnish multilingual keyboard layout allows typing the letters Š/š and Ž/ž by pressing AltGr+'+S for š and AltGr+'+Z for ž.In Estonian, Finnish and Karelian these are not palatalized but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian Nissi is distinct from nišši. 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 appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and when not available, they can be substituted with 'h': 'sh' for 'š', in print.
In the orthographies of the Sami languages, the letters Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž appear in Northern Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami. Skolt Sami also uses three other consonants with the caron: Ǯ/ǯ to mark the voiced postalveolar affricate , Ǧ/ǧ to mark the voiced palatal affricate and Ǩ/ǩ the corresponding voiceless palatal affricate. More often than not, they are geminated: vuäǯǯad "to get". The orthographies of the more southern Sami languages of Sweden and Norway such as Lule Sami do not use caron, and prefer instead the digraphs tj and sj.