Circumflex: Encyclopedia - Circumflex

Circumflex

accent

breve ( ˘ )
caron / háček ( ˇ )
cedilla ( ¸ )
circumflex ( ˆ )
diaeresis ( ¨ )
dot ( · )

hook / dấu hỏi (  ̉ )
macron ( ˉ )
ogonek ( ˛ )
ring / kroužek ( ˚ )
spiritus asper ( ʽ )
spiritus lenis (  ʼ )
umlaut ( ¨ )

apostrophe ( ’ )
bar ( | )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
hyphen ( ˗ )
tilde ( ˜ )
titlo (  ҃ )

The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.

• In Greek, the circumflex occurs (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels, and where there is a rise and then a fall in tone in Ancient Greek. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, sometimes taking a form similar to a tilde, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.

• In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î ô, and û. It generally marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word – for example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest); Note that the former French spelling is current in English. Fenêtre (window), for instance, is derived from the Latin word fenestra. Certain close homophones are distinguished by the circumflex, for instance cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "rib" or "coast"). The letter ê is pronounced like è. In the usual pronunciations of central and northern France, ô is pronounced like eau; in the usual pronunciations Southern France, no distinction is made between ô and o. In Belgian pronunciation, it often lengthens the vowel; fête (party) is longer than fait (fact).

• In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA: β), hence the name of the country Malaŵi.

• In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ. It indicates a completely different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collation. See Esperanto orthography.

• In Norwegian, it is used, with the exception of loan words, on ô and ê, almost exclusively in the words "fôr" (from Norse fóðr), meaning "animal food", lêr, meaning "skin" (Norse leðr) and "vêr" (Norse veðr), meaning "weather".

• In English the circumflex, like other diacriticals, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century--before the cheap penny post and an era in which paper was taxed--the circumflex was used in postal letters to save room in an analogy with the French use. Specifically, the letters "ugh" were replaced when they were silent in the most common words, e.g., "thô" for "though", "thorô" for "thorough", and "brôt" for "brought" — similar to the way in which people today abbreviate words in text messages. This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not.

• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'. Their names are "â din a" and "î din i".

• In Slovak, circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter "o" into a diphthong ô /u̯o/.

• In Vietnamese, the circumflex helps to distinguish three couples of vowels : ô [o] and o [ɔ], ê [e] and e [ɛ], â [ɐ] and a [ɑ]. It is not a tonal mark, so that you can for instance find association of circumflex and tonal mark, like ệ, which appears in the word Việt Nam

• In Kunrei-shiki Romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It is also occasionally used as a surrogate for the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.

• In Welsh the circumflex (colloquially known as the to bach -- "little roof") is used on the vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y to differentiate between other words that have the same spelling. The circumflex in Welsh gives a vowel a long sound, for example môr versus mor.

• In Portuguese, it is used on â, ê and ô. The latter two symbols denote the stressed close-mid vowels [e] and [o]. The symbol â (always before a nasal consonant -m or -n: pântano, "bog", câmara, "chamber" or "camera"), denotes a stressed central vowel, slightly nasalized in Brazilian Portuguese. The circumflex accent is sometimes employed to distinguish homophone words, e.g., tem (he has) and têm (they have). Its use has been much reduced as a consequence of orthographic reforms.

• In Italian it is used in plurals of singulars ending with -io, thus ending them with a longer i. In modern Italian this is accomplished with a double or just a single i as in varî, varj, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).

• In transcription of Akkadian, it is used to indicate a long vowel resulting from an aleph contraction.

• In standard Friulian it is used on each of the five vowels to mark that vowel as long; since long vowels are a typical feature of Friulian, the circumflex is used a lot.

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters â, ê, î, ô, û, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also uses the circumflex as a combining character.

The circumflex receives its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent about)--a translation of the Greek perispomene (περισπωμένη).

• The circumflex (or caret) character is also used without a vowel to represent exponentiation in ASCII:

2^3 = 8

• Circumflex is also an important Dutch student union.

• A caret is used by editors to indicate on a proof where something should be inserted. It is placed below the line in question for a line-level punctuation mark (e.g., a comma) or above for a higher character (e.g., an apostrophe). The material to be inserted can be placed inside the caret, in the margin, or opposite the caret above the word.

  A caret is also used to center characters vertically. In such cases carets are placed both under and above the character facing opposite directions.

See also

• Acute accent
• Diacritic marks
• Diaeresis
• Grave accent
• Umlaut

Category: Diacritics

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Circumflex", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki