O͘
O͘, or o͘, is one of the six Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography. It is pronounced, like the pronunciation of in "law". The orthography also uses diacritics to indicate tone, and the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first or fourth tone. The other possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it:
- Ó͘ ó͘ 《陰上／阴上》
- Ò͘ ò͘ 《陰去／阴去》
- Ô͘ ô͘ 《陽平／阳平》
- Ǒ͘ ǒ͘ 《陽上／阳上》
- Ō͘ ō͘ 《陽去／阳去》
- O̍͘ o̍͘ 《陽入／阳入》
- Ŏ͘ ŏ͘ / Ő͘ ő͘
History
The character was introduced by the Xiamen-based missionary Elihu Doty in the mid-nineteenth century, as a way to distinguish the Hokkien vowels and . Since then it has become established in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography, with only occasional deviations early in its usage – one example being Carstairs Douglas's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, where he replaced the with , and a second example being Tan Siew Imm's 2016 dictionary of Penang Hokkien, where she replaced the with.
Computing
In the Unicode computer encoding, it is a normal Latin o followed by, and is not to be confused with the Vietnamese Ơ. This letter is not well-supported by fonts and is often typed as either o·, o•, o', oo, or ou.