Modern languages use many different alphabets: Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and others. But what if there are more sounds in the language than there are letters? How to indicate that it is here that “a” is more like “e”, and “o” is more like “y”? Diacritics come to the rescue.
Definition
In linguistics, diacritical marks are called subscript, superscript or sometimes even inline signs, which indicate the peculiarity of the pronunciation of a particular letter. When writing, these signs are very important, because they serve to distinguish the meaning of words. Some languages do without them at all, like English, and some have very common diacritics, like Czech or Vietnamese.
A bit of history
The first use of diacritics is attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium, who in his notes so denoted musical stress, aspiration, as well as the length or shortness of vowels. Diacritical marks were mainly distributed in languages that used the Latin alphabet, but were not related to Latin itself, since it did not have anyhissing sounds, no nasal vowels, palatalized (softened) consonants.
Many meanings of diacritics have survived since that time: for example, a slash indicates stress, and diaeresis (two dots above a vowel) in Romance languages indicates that two consecutive vowels do not form a diphthong. However, there are signs that change their meaning depending on the language and time. The same diaeresis in German denotes a permutation, which is why the Germanists call these two points an umlaut (German for "permutation").
Types of diacritics
There is no ordered system for classifying diacritics, but one of the most obvious is the division of diacritics into superscript, subscript, and inline by the way they are written. These can be strokes, ticks, circles and dots located next to or on the letter.
Dicritics have different purposes. Signs that perform a phonetic function give the letter a new sound, different from the main one, or vice versa, indicate that the letter does not change its sound, despite the environment. Some signs also indicate the prosodic characteristics of sounds, that is, its longitude, strength, sonority, and so on.
Some diacritics perform an orthographic function to distinguish between homograph words, such as the Spanish si "if" and Sí "yes". There are diacritics that are traditionally used and do not affect either the meaning or the pronunciation, such as the two dots over the "i" in the English naïve.
Accessors
Occurs in modern languagesmany examples of diacritics of various kinds. So, for example, a stroke with a right-slope "á" can be called an acute accent or an aksantegyu and indicate an acute accent. In Russian, this sign can simply be called the stress sign, since there are no varieties of stress in the language. The same feature is used in Polish with consonants to indicate their softness, and in Czech - to indicate the length of vowels.
His twin brother, the backwards slanted "à" usually denotes a heavy accent, or grave, in Greek, French, and South Slavic. In Chinese, this sign means a falling tone.
The sign of the "hat" of the sound "â" is usually called the circumflex. In modern languages, it is usually used to indicate vowel length, as in French or Italian. The corner is also found in the transcription of Sanskrit and other Semitic languages.
The closest relative of the circumflex tilde "ñ" in medieval documents is used to reduce the spelling of doubled consonants or indicate a nasal pronunciation if there was no other designation for this sound. The Spanish tilde now shows the softness of n, and some scholars use it to indicate nasal vowels.
The already mentioned diaeresis, which is two dots above the letter "ä", indicates a separate reading of diphthongs or a transposition. This is one of the characters that is also used in Russian to create the letter "e", but recently it has been increasingly omitted.
Some while writing fastreplace two dots with a vertical bar, changing diaeresis to macron. Basically, this sign indicates the longitude and shortness of vowels, for example, in Latin.
In Slavic languages, especially Czech, there is often a sign resembling a bird - "ž" haček. In Czech, it marks soft and hissing consonants, and in Finno-Ugric and B altic languages it marks the sounds [h], [sh] and [u]. Gachek is often used when transliterating Russian or Slavic names and titles into Latin to avoid long letter combinations.
An interesting example of a diacritical mark can also be considered an accent circle, which in the Scandinavian languages is used with the vowel "sh" to indicate a more open [o].
Subscripts
In appearance, subscripts usually correspond to their superscript counterparts - these are various caps, dots, circles and strokes. Sometimes the letter still “grows a tail”, which is also considered a diacritic. As with superscripts, subscripts can be written separately from the letter, but are more typically written together.
A common subscript is the "ç" segil, which originally functioned in Spanish but is no longer used. Most often this sign is used in French to indicate the pronunciation of the letter c as [c]. Segil is also used in Turkish, marking the sounds [j], [h], [s] and [sh].
In addition to the segil, there is also a c-tail, which in Polish is called ogonek and is used for nasal vowels "ą" and "ę".
Inline characters
Such signs are written or printed on top of letters, usually these are strokes of various types. So, for example, a horizontal stroke over the Latin "d" in Vietnamese denotes the sound [d]. In Scandinavian languages, namely Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic, the diagonal stroke over the "o" denotes the same sound that Swedish and German denote with two dots. The same stroke over the letter "l" in Polish indicates its softness.
The diacritics are very small but very important parts of letters. Omitting them can lead to misunderstanding and distortion of the meaning of the text, so always pay attention to all the small dots, strokes and circles that accompany the letter.