Double acute accent: Encyclopedia - Double acute accent

Double acute accent

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 double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. The signs formed with diacritic marks count as letters of their own right in the Hungarian alphabet.

Double acute accent - Use in Hungarian

Standard Hungarian has 14 vowels in a symmetrical system: seven short vowels, (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written with in the case of a, e, i, o, u with an acute accent, and in the case of ö, ü with the double acute (instead of using diaeresis+acute). (Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it has a lexical and grammatical distinctive function).

The double acute acts as combined acute with a diaeresis, giving the longer version of ö and ü.

Length marks first appeared in the Hungarian orthography in the 15th century under the influence of the Hussite orthography. Initially, only á and é only marked as these two vowels have a noticeable qualitative difference in addition to the quantitative one. Later í, ó, ú are marked as well, but up to the 18th century length marks were not used for ö and ü. In the 18th century, still before the Hungarian typography was fixed, the diaeresis+acute form (ǘ) was used in some printed documents. The double-acute version was found to be a more esthetic solution and introduced by 19th century typographers.

Double acute accent - Other uses

The double acute accent is also used in south Slavic phonetic alphabets as used by linguists to show a certain kind of tone. It is not used in orthography, and is not part of any southern Slavic alphabet.

The tonal marking system in IPA (and many other phonetic alphabets) is the following (demonstrated with an 'e'):

Double acute accent - Technical notes

O and U with double acute accents are supported in the ISO 8859-2 and UTF-8 codepages.

All occurencies of "double acute" in the Unicode 4.1 standard:

Note, that the last entry is unrelated to the others above, and got its name purely by analogy of its shape.

Double acute accent - External link

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (contains some incorrect/sloppy data on history)

Categories: Diacritics | Hungarian language

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