What does a diacritical mark do
A diacritical mark is a symbol or a glyph added to a letter in some alphabets to indicate a specific pronunciation or stress, or to distinguish between different sounds or meanings of words. It alters the sound or pronunciation of the letter it is attached to. Some common examples of diacritical marks include accents (such as the acute accent or the circumflex), umlauts, tilde, cedilla, and breve. These marks are used in various languages, such as French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, among others, to represent specific phonetic elements or to differentiate between similar letters.
A diacritical mark, also known as a diacritic, is a small symbol or added mark that appears above, below, beside, or through a letter in a word. Diacritical marks are used in many languages to modify the pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical function of the base letter or phoneme. Here are some common functions of diacritical marks:
1. Accent marks: These marks change the stress or tone of a vowel. For example, in Spanish, the acute accent (´) is used to indicate stress, as in "árbol" (tree).
2. Umlauts: These marks consist of two dots above a letter and are primarily used in German to indicate a sound change. For example, in German, "ä" represents the sound "e" and "ö" represents the sound "oe".
3. Cedilla: This mark, which is a small tail-like curl beneath the letter "c" (ç), is used in French and other languages to indicate that the "c" is pronounced as an "s" sound instead of a "k" sound.
4. Tilde: The tilde (~) is used in various languages, including Spanish and Portuguese, to indicate nasalization of a vowel or a specific pronunciation.
5. Macron and breve: These marks are used in various languages to indicate long and short vowel sounds. Macron (¯) is a line placed over a vowel to indicate a long sound, and breve (˘) is a curvy line placed above a vowel to indicate a short sound.
6. Dot above and dot below: These marks are used in languages such as Polish and Lithuanian to change the pronunciation or differentiate between similar letters. In Polish, a dot above (ż) distinguishes the letter "z" from the letter "ź."
These are just a few examples of the many diacritical marks used in different languages. The purpose of each mark is to modify the pronunciation, meaning, or grammatical function of the letter it accompanies.