Modern languages use many different alphabets: Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic and others. But what if the sounds in the language are distinguished more than there are letters? How to indicate that it is here that “a” is more like “e”, and “o” is more like “y”? Diacritical signs come to the rescue.
Definition
Diacritical marks in linguistics are called subscript, superscript, or sometimes even in-line characters that indicate a particular 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, such as English, and in some diacritics are very common, for example, in Czech or Vietnamese.
A bit of history
The first use of diacritics is attributed to Aristophanes of Byzantium, who in his recordings so denoted musical stress, aspiration, as well as the longitude or shortness of vowels. Diacritical signs were mainly distributed in languages that used the Latin alphabet, but were not related to Latin itself, since it had neither hissing sounds, nor nasal vowels, palatalized (softened) consonants.
Many meanings of diacritics have been preserved since that time: for example, the slash indicates stress, and the dieresis (two dots above the vowel) in Romance languages indicates that two vowels do not form a diphthong in a row. However, there are signs that change their meaning depending on the language and time. The same derezis in German denotes mutation, therefore the Germanists call these two points umlaut (German: “mutation”).
Types of diacritics
There is no orderly system for classifying diacritical signs, but one of the most obvious is the division of them according to the method of writing into superscript, subscript, and in-line. It can be strokes, checkmarks, circles and dots located next to or on the letter.
Diacritics have different purposes. Signs that perform a phonetic function, give the letter a new, different from the main sound, or vice versa, indicate that the letter does not change its sound, despite the environment. Some signs also indicate prosodic characteristics of sounds, that is, its longitude, strength, sonority and so on.
Some diacritics perform a spelling function to distinguish homograph words, such as the Spanish si "if" and Sí "yes." There are diacritics that are used traditionally and do not affect either the meaning or pronunciation, such as the two dots above the “i” in English naïve.
Superscript characters
In modern languages, there are many examples of diacritics of various kinds. So, for example, a stroke with a slope to the right “á” can be called an acute or axantegu and indicate acute stress. In Russian, this sign can simply be called the accent sign, since the accent has no variations in the language. The same feature is used in Polish with consonants to indicate their softness, and in Czech - to indicate the longitude of the vowels.
His twin brother, slanting “à” to the other side, usually denotes heavy stress, or gravel, in Greek, French, and South Slavic languages. In Chinese, this sign means a downward tone.
The “cap” of the sound “â” is usually called the circumflex. In modern languages, it is usually used to indicate the length of a vowel, such as in French or Italian. The corner also occurs when transcribing Sanskrit and other languages of the Semitic group.
The closest relative of the circumflex tilde “ñ” in medieval documents is used to reduce the writing of double consonants or to indicate nasal pronunciation, unless there was another designation for this sound. Now the Spanish tilde shows softness n, and some scholars use it to designate nasal vowels.
The already mentioned dieresis, which is two dots above the letter "ä", indicates a separate reading of diphthongs or mutation. This is one of the signs that is also used in the Russian language to create the letter "e", but recently it has been omitted more and more often.
Some in quick writing replace two dots with a vertical bar, changing the derezis to macron. Basically, this sign denotes the longitude and brevity of vowels, for example, in Latin.
In Slavic languages, especially Czech, a sign resembling a bird is often found - “ž” gadget. In Czech, he notes soft and hissing consonants, and in Finno-Ugric and Baltic languages he designates sounds [h], [w] and [u]. Gachek is often used in transliteration of Russian or Slavic names and Latin names in order to avoid long letter combinations.
An interesting example of a diacretic sign can also be considered a superscript circle, which in the Scandinavian languages is used with the vowel "w" to indicate a more open [o].
Subscript characters
In their appearance, subscripts usually correspond to their superscript counterparts - these are various hats, dots, circles and strokes. Sometimes a letter also has a “tail growing”, which is also considered a diacritic. Like superscripts, subscripts can be written separately from the letter, but fused spelling is more characteristic.
A common subscript is the segil “ç”, which originally functioned in Spanish but is no longer in use. Most often, this sign is used in French to designate the pronunciation of the letter c as [c]. Segil is also used in Turkish, noting the sounds [j], [h], [s] and [w].
In addition to the segil, a c-shaped tail is also distinguished, which is called ogonek in Polish and is used for the nasal vowels ą and ę.
Inline characters
Such characters are written or printed on top of letters, usually it is a different kind of strokes. So, for example, a horizontal bar over the Latin “d” in Vietnamese denotes the sound [d]. In the Scandinavian languages, namely in Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic, a diagonal bar over “o” indicates the same sound as in Swedish and German is indicated by two dots. The same stroke on top of the letter “l” in Polish indicates its softness.
Diacritical marks are very small, but very important parts of letters. Their omission 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.