diacritical
/ˌdʌɪəˈkrɪtɪk(ə)l
/adjective
(Of a mark or sign) serving to indicate different pronunciations of a letter above or below which it is written.The present orthographic system was introduced in the fourteenth century by the religious reformer Jan Hus, who instituted a system of diacritical markings to eliminate consonant clusters....
- Slovak, like other Slavic languages, has diacritical marks that govern the pronunciation of both consonants and vowels.
- In modern written Vietnamese, which uses the romanized system of writing introduced by European missionaries, the tones are indicated by diacritical marks, or marks written above and below the vowel in each syllable.
Derivatives
diacritically
- The key thing that you need to remember is that you can't search for diacritically marked words by simple roman input.
- But it would be very inconvenient to insist on such an encoding for Turkish, in which diacritically marked letters have their own separate positions in the alphabet.
- The Scandinavian languages, by contrast, treat the diacritics as new and separate letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z. Other languages treat diacritically marked letters as variants of the underlying letter, but alphabetize them following the unmarked letter.