Dot diacritic: Encyclopedia - Dot diacritic

Dot (diacritic)

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 (  ҃ )

When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the middle dot (·), or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' (  ̇) and 'combining dot below' (  ̣) which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Eastern European languages and Vietnamese.

Example characters: ċ/Ċ from Maltese and Irish Gaelic (old orthography), ė/Ė from Lithuanian, ġ/Ġ from Maltese and Irish Gaelic (old orthography), ż/Ż from Polish, etc. In Irish Gaelic the dot is called a sí buailte.

Dot diacritic - Usage

In Vietnamese, the nặng (low, glottal) tone is repesented with a dot below the base vowel: ạ ặ ậ ẹ ệ ị ọ ộ ợ ụ ự ỵ. The dot above the lowercase i and j (and uppercase İ in Turkish) is not seen as a dot, but rather as part of the character, and the double dots above several Latin letters such as ä, ë etc. are not dots either, but are Umlauts or diaereses.

In romanizations of Semitic languages, a dot below a consonant is used to indicate the "emphatic version" of that consonant. E.g. ṣ represents emphatic s.

In IAST and National Library at Calcutta romanization, transcribing Indic languages, a dot below a letter indicates retroflex consonants.

In Yoruba, the dot is used below the o, the e and the s: those three letters can also occur without dot as another letter.

In mathematics and physics the dot denotes the time derivative as in .

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