Inverted breve or arch is a mark, shaped like the top half of a circle ( ̑ ), that is, like an upside-down breve (˘). It looks similar to the circumflex (ˆ), which has a sharp tip ( Â â Ê ê Î î Ô ô Û û), while the inverted breve is rounded: ( Ȃ ȃ Ȇ ȇ Ȋ ȋ Ȏ ȏ Ȗ ȗ).
Inverted breve can occur above or below the letter. It is not used in any natural language alphabet. It is identical in form to the Ancient Greek circumflex.
Uses
Serbo-Croatian
The inverted breve above is used in traditional
Slavic studies notation of Serbo-Croatian phonology to indicate long falling accent. It is placed above the
syllable nucleus, which can be one of five vowels (ȃ ȇ ȋ ȏ ȗ) or syllabic ȓ. This use of the inverted breve is derived from the
Ancient Greek circumflex, which was preserved in the
Greek diacritics of
Modern Greek and influenced early Serbian
Cyrillic script printing through religious literature. In the early 19th century, it began to be used in both Latin and Cyrillic as a
diacritic to mark prosody in the systematic study of the
Serbo-Croatian linguistic continuum.
International Phonetic Alphabet
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, an inverted breve below or is used to mark a vowel as non-syllabic, i.e. assuming the role of a
semivowel. The diacritic thus expands upon the four primary symbols the IPA reserves for semivowels, which correspond to the full vowels , respectively. Any vowel is eligible for marking as non-syllabic; a frequent use of the diacritic is in conjunction with the centralised equivalents of the vowels just mentioned: .
The same diacritic is placed under iota to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *y as it relates to Ancient Greek; upsilon with an inverted breve is also sometimes used insead of digamma to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *w.[Herbert Weir Smyth. Greek Grammar. par. 20 a: semivowels.]
Encoding
Inverted breve characters are supported in
Unicode and
HTML code (decimal numeric character reference).
|
|
| ̑ |
| ̯ |
| ͡ |
| ᷼ |
| ꭛ |
| Ȃ |
| ȃ |
| Ȇ |
| ȇ |
| Ȋ |
| ȋ |
| Ȏ |
| ȏ |
| Ȓ |
| ȓ |
| Ȗ |
| ȗ |
In LaTeX the control \textroundcap{o} with \usepackage{tipa} puts an inverted breve over the letter o.
See also
Notes
External links
