Breve: Encyclopedia - Breve

Breve

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 (  ҃ )

A breve (Latin Brevis "short, brief") is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like a little round cup, designed to indicate a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯ which indicates long vowels. It is used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin and some other languages. It looks similar to caron or háček, but the caron has a sharp tip, whilst the breve is rounded. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve).

In the Cyrillic alphabet, a breve is used for Й (short I). In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (U short) and Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. In the Chuvash a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (Ye-breve).

In other languages, it is used for other purposes. In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the schwa (ə) vowel, as in mǎr (apple). In Esperanto it can be used above the U to form a non-syllabic U, similar to English W in sound. G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets.

Breve, together with circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.

Note that pinyin uses the caron to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese, not the breve. McCune-Reischauer uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate hangul ㅓ and ㅡ.

Breve - Encoding breves

Unicode and HTML numeric entities for breve letters

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