Ring (diacritic)

The ring diacritic (˚) redirects here. It is not to be confused with the superscript lower-case o (o), the ordinal indicator (º), or the degree symbol (°).
For other uses, see Ring (disambiguation).

A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.

˚
Ring
Diacritics in Latin & Greek
accent
acute( ´ )
double acute( ˝ )
grave( ` )
double grave(  ̏ )
breve( ˘ )
inverted breve(  ̑ )
caron, háček( ˇ )
cedilla( ¸ )
circumflex( ˆ )
diaeresis, umlaut( ¨ )
dot( · )
hook, hook above(   ̡   ̢  ̉ )
horn(  ̛ )
iota subscript(  ͅ  )
macron( ¯ )
ogonek, nosinė( ˛ )
perispomene(  ͂  )
ring( ˚, ˳ )
rough breathing( )
smooth breathing( ᾿ )
Marks sometimes used as diacritics
apostrophe( )
bar( ◌̸ )
colon( : )
comma( , )
hyphen( ˗ )
tilde( ~ )
Diacritical marks in other scripts
Arabic diacritics
Early Cyrillic diacritics
kamora(  ҄ )
pokrytie(  ҇ )
titlo(  ҃ )
Gurmukhī diacritics
Hebrew diacritics
Indic diacritics
anusvara( )
chandrabindu( )
nukta( )
virama( )
chandrakkala( )
IPA diacritics
Japanese diacritics
dakuten( )
handakuten( )
Khmer diacritics
Syriac diacritics
Thai diacritics
Related
Dotted circle
Punctuation marks
Logic symbols
Å å
Ǻ ǻ
Å̂ å̂
Å̃ å̃
Å̄ å̄
Å̆ å̆
Ā̊ ā̊
Ą̊ ą̊
Å̱ å̱
E̊̄ e̊̄
Ō̊ ō̊
Ů ů
Ů́ ů́
Ů̃ ů̃
Ũ̊ ũ̊
Ū̊ ū̊
L̥̄ l̥̄
R̥̄ r̥̄

Ring above

In Unicode, the above encoding is: U+030A ̊ COMBINING RING ABOVE (HTML ̊).

Though the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Walloon character Å (å) is derived from an A with a ring, it is considered a distinct letter in those languages. The letter Å is the symbol of the unit ångström, named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström.

The character Ů (ů; a Latin U with ring above, or kroužek in Czech) is a grapheme in the Czech language preserved for historic reasons, which identifies a vowel shift. For example, the word for "horse" used to be written kóň, which evolved, along with pronunciation, into kuoň. Ultimately, the vowel [o] disappeared completely, and the uo evolved into ů, modern form kůň. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú (long [uː]), but changes to a short o when a word is morphed (e.g. nom. kůň → gen. koně, nom. dům → gen. domu), thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Ů cannot occur in initial position, however, ú occurs almost exclusively in initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound. These characters are used also in Steuer's Silesian alphabet. The [uo] pronunciation has prevailed in some Moravian dialects, as well as in the Slovak language, which uses the letter ô instead of ů.

The ring is used in Bolognese (a dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo language) to distinguish the sound /ɑ/ (å) from /a/ (a).

ů has been used in Old Lithuanian in Lithuania Minor from the 16th till the beginning of the 20th century and for a shorter time in 16th-century Lithuania Major for diphthong [uo].

The ring has been used in the Lithuanian Cyrillic alphabet promoted by Russian authorities in the last quarter of the 19th century with the letter У̊ / у̊ used to represent the /wɔ/ diphthong (now written uo in Lithuanian orthography).

Ring upon e (e̊) is used by certain dialectologists of the Walloon language (especially Jean-Jacques Gaziaux) to note the /ə/ vowel typically replacing /i/ and /y/ in the Brabant province central Walloon dialects. The difficulty of type-writing it has led some writers to prefer ë for the same sound.

Many more characters can be created in Unicode using the "combining ring above" U+030A, including the above-mentioned у̊ (Cyrillic у with ring above) or ń̊ (n with acute and ring above). The standalone ring above symbol has the codepoint U+02DA.

Although similar in appearance, it is not to be confused with the Japanese handakuten (゜ U+309C), a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with [p].

Ring below

Unicode encodes the ring below at U+0325 ̥ COMBINING RING BELOW

The diacritic is used in IPA to indicate voicelessness, and in Indo-European studies or in Sanskrit transliteration (IAST) to indicate syllabicity of r, l, m, n etc. (e.g. corresponding to IPA [ɹ̩]).

Examples:

Half rings

Half rings also exist as diacritic marks, these are characters U+0351 ͑ COMBINING LEFT HALF RING ABOVE and U+0357 ͗ COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE. These characters may be used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, denoting roundedness. They are here given with the lowercase a: a͑ and a͗.

Other, similar signs are in use in Armenian: the U+0559 ՙ ARMENIAN MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RING and the U+055A ՚ ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE.

Unicode supports U+031C ̜ COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW and U+0339 ̹ COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING BELOW.

Other uses

The ring is used in the transliteration of the Abkhaz language to represent the letter ҩ. It may also be used in place of the abbreviation symbol when transliterating the Devanagari alphabet.

Furthermore, ˚ "modifier letter ring above" (U+02DA) is a character of the Spacing Modifier Letters range (U+02B0–02FF).

Similar marks

The ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the dot or U+0366 ͦ COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER O diacritic marks, or with the degree sign °.

The half ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the comma or ogonek diacritic marks.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, April 18, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.