Caron

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For other uses, see Caron (disambiguation).
HACEK organisms are a subgroup of bacteria.

Template:Diacritical marks

č ď ě Ǩ Ľ ř š ž

A caron ( ˇ ), also known as wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat or by the Czech name háček (pronounced Template:IPA), is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization or iotation in the orthography of Baltic languages and some Slavic languages, whereas some Finno-Lappic languages use it to mark postalveolar fricatives (sh, zh, ch).

It looks similar to a breve, but has a sharp tip, like an inverted circumflex (^), while a breve is rounded. Compare the caron: Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ to the breve: Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ.

The left (downward) stroke is thicker than the right (upward) stroke in typographically correct typefaces, but these are rare.

The caron is also used as a symbol in mathematics.

Contents

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Etymology

The name háček appears in most English dictionaries. In Czech, háček means 'little hook', the diminutive form of hák. The Czech plural form is háčky.

The term caron is used in the official names of Unicode characters (e.g., "Latin capital letter Z with caron"). It seems to have originated in computing references in the mid-1980s [1].

In Slovak it is called mäkčeň (i.e. 'softener' or 'palatalization mark'), in Slovenian strešica ('little roof'), in Croatian and Serbian kvaka or kvačica (also 'small hook'), katus ('roof') in Estonian and hattu ('hat') in some Finnic languages besides Estonian.

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Usage

The use of the caron (and the acute accent) for Latin characters was introduced into the Czech language in the fifteenth century by Jan Hus in his De Ortographia Bohemica (1412). Today the caron is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Bosniaks; Serbs and Macedonians (when romanizing the official Cyrillic); Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Belarusians (formerly in the Łacinka Latin alphabet, now only in romanization of the official Cyrillic). For the fricatives sh, zh and the affricate ch only, it can be used in those Finno-Lappic languages which use a Latin alphabet, such as Estonian, Finnish, Karelian and some Sami languages.

The caron is also used in the Romany alphabet. The Faggin-Nazzi writing system for the Friulian language 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 (a method used in linguistics, based on the Croatian alphabet). Philologists—and the standard Finnish orthography—often prefer using it to express the sounds that in English require a digraph (sh, ch, and zh) because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell these sounds (the key exceptions are Polish sz and cz). Its use for this purpose can even be found in America, because certain atlases use it in romanization of foreign place names.

It is also used as an accent mark, that is, to indicate a change in the pronunciation of a vowel. The main example is in Pinyin for Chinese, where it represents a falling-rising tone.

The caron is used in Americanist phonetic notation as a diacritic to indicate various types of pronunciation.

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Writing and printing carons

In printed text, the caron combined with some particular letters is reduced to a small line (as in ť, ď, ľ, Ľ). This only rarely happens in handwritten text. Although the small line may look like an apostrophe, that is definitely not the case. Using apostrophe in place of a caron looks very unprofessional though it is quite common on goods produced in foreign countries and imported to Slovakia or the Czech Republic (compare t' and t’ to ť, L'ahko and L’ahko to Ľahko). Foreigners also sometimes mistake caron for the acute accent (compare Ĺ to Ľ, ĺ to ľ).

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List of letters

A complete list of Czech and Slovak letters and digraphs with the háček/caron:

A complete list of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian letters and digraphs with the háček/caron:

  • Č/č (pronounced Template:IPA — similar to 'ch' in cheap
  • Š/š (pronounced Template:IPA — similar to 'sh' in she
  • Ž/ž (pronounced Template:IPA — similar to 's' in treasure
  • Ř/ř (only in Upper Sorbian: pronounced Template:IPA) - similar to 'sh' in she
  • Tř/tř (only in Upper Sorbian) - soft 'ts' sound
  • Ě/ě (pronounced Template:IPA) - similar to 'e' in bed

Of the Baltic and Slavic languages, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Latvian also use the digraph Dž/dž. The Belarusian Lacinka alphabet as well as Bulgarian may also use them at times.

Of the Finnic languages, Estonian (and transcriptions to Finnish) use Š/š and Ž/ž, and Karelian and some Sami languages use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž — DŽ is not a separate letter. (Skolt Sami has more, see below.) The presence of Č is 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, where only one length is recognized for 'tš'. (Incidentally, in transcriptions, the Finnish orthography has to employ complicated notations like mettšä or even the mettshä to express Karelian meččä.)

Notice that these are not palatalized, but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian Nissi (palatalized) is distinct from nišši (postalveolar). 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 (and in Estonian, very rarely č) appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and, when not available, can be substituted with 'h', e.g., 'sh' for 'š', in print.

Skolt Sami uses Ʒ/ʒ (ezh) to mark the alveolar affricate [dz], thus Ǯ/ǯ (ezh-caron) marks the postalveolar affricate [dʒ]. In addition to Č, Š, Ž and Ǯ, Skolt Sami also uses the caron – inconsistently – to mark the palatal stops Ǧ [ɟ] and Ǩ [c]. More often than not, these are geminated, e.g. vuäǯǯad "to get".

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Other uses

The caron is also used in Mandarin Chinese pinyin romanization and orthographies of several other tonal languages to indicate the "falling-rising" tone (third tone in Mandarin). The caron can be placed over the vowels ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ.

The characters Ě/ě are a part of the Unicode Latin Extended-A set because they occur in Czech, while the rest are in Latin Extended-B, which often causes an inconsistent appearance.

The recommendation in Finnish is to use š instead of "sh" and ž for "zh" in transliterations, e.g. Hovanštšina, not Hovanshtshina. However, as Finnish uses neither sound, and neither keyboards nor the ubiquitous ISO 8859-1 codepage support these characters, this recommendation is rarely followed. On some Finnish keyboards, it is possible to write these letters by typing s or z while holding right Alt key or AltGr key.

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Software

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Unicode

For legacy reasons most letters which can carry carons exist as precomposed characters in Unicode, but a caron can also be added to any letter (often with rather ugly results due to deficiencies in font rendering) by using the character U+030C COMBINING CARON, for example: b̌ q̌.

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TeX

In TeX, a caron can be inserted using the control sequence \v in text, or \check in mathematics. For example:

$\check{x}$ <math>\check{x}</math>
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Macintosh

On Mac OS X's 'Extended' keyboard (US layout only: there is no extended layout for other languages) layouts the caron is typed by pressing option-v followed by the letter you want. The combination shift-option-v will produce a combining caron appended to the previous character.

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Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word, you can usually find letters with carons by clicking Insert → Symbol → Symbols. Select "(normal text)".

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XFree86

In recent versions of XFree86/X.Org servers, letters with carons can be typed as a compose sequence <compose> c <letter>, e.g. pressing compose-key c e yields the letter ě.cs:Háček de:Hatschek fr:Hatchek hu:Hacsek sl:Strešica sv:Caron

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