Inverted breve

Inverted breve or arch is a diacritical mark, shaped like the top half of a circle ( ̑ ), that is, like an upside-down breve (˘). It looks similar to the circumflex (ˆ), but the circumflex has a sharp tip; the inverted breve is rounded: compare Ȃ ȃ Ȇ ȇ Ȋ ȋ Ȏ ȏ Ȗ ȗ (inverted breve) versus  â Ê ê Î î Ô ô Û û (circumflex).

̑
Inverted breve
Diacritics in Latin & Greek accent acute´ double acute˝ grave` double grave ̏ circumflexˆ caron, háčekˇ breve˘ inverted breve  ̑   cedilla¸ diaeresis, umlaut¨ dot· palatal hook  ̡ retroflex hook  ̢ hook above, dấu hỏi ̉ horn ̛ iota subscript ͅ  macronˉ ogonek, nosinė˛ perispomene ͂  overring˚ underring˳ rough breathing῾ smooth breathing᾿ Marks sometimes used as diacritics apostrophe’ bar◌̸ colon: comma, full stop/period. hyphen˗ prime′ tilde~ Diacritical marks in other scripts Arabic diacritics Early Cyrillic diacritics kamora ҄ pokrytie ҇ titlo ҃ Gurmukhī diacritics Hebrew diacritics Indic diacritics anusvaraं ং ം chandrabinduँ ఁ nukta़ virama् ് ్ ් ್ visargaः ঃ IPA diacritics Japanese diacritics dakuten ﾞ handakuten ﾟ Khmer diacritics Syriac diacritics Thai diacritics Related Dotted circle◌ Punctuation marks Logic symbols

Ȃ	ȃ
Ȇ	ȇ
Ȋ	ȋ
Ȏ	ȏ
Ȓ	ȓ
Ȗ	ȗ

Inverted breve can occur above or below the letter. It is not used in any natural language alphabet, but only as a phonetic indicator though it is identical in form to the Ancient Greek circumflex.

Uses

Serbo-Croatian

The inverted breve above is used in traditional Slavicist notation of Serbo-Croatian phonology to indicate long falling accent. It is placed above the syllable nucleus, which can be one of five vowels (ȃ ȇ ȋ ȏ ȗ) or syllabic ȓ.

This use of the inverted breve is derived from the Ancient Greek circumflex, which was preserved in the polytonic orthography of Modern Greek and influenced early Serbian Cyrillic printing through religious literature. In the early 19th century, it began to be used in both Latin and Cyrillic as a diacritic to mark prosody in the systematic study of the Serbian-Croatian linguistic continuum.

International Phonetic Alphabet

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, inverted breve below is used to denote that the vowel is not syllabic. Thus, semivowels are transcribed either using dedicated symbols (of which there are only a few, e.g. [j, w, ɥ]) or by adding the diacritic to a vowel sound (e.g. [i̯, u̯]), enabling more possible semivowels (e.g. [ɐ̯, ʏ̯, e̯]).

The same diacritic is placed under iota (ι̯) to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *y as it relates to Greek grammar; upsilon with an inverted breve (υ̯) is used alongside digamma (ϝ) to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *w.[1]

Encoding

Inverted breve characters are supported in Unicode and HTML code (decimal numeric character reference).

Name	Letter	Unicode	HTML
Combining Inverted Breve	◌̑	U+0311	̑
Combining Inverted Breve Below	◌̯	U+032F	̯
Combining Double Inverted Breve	◌͡◌	U+0361	͡
Combining Double Inverted Breve Below	◌᷼◌	U+1DFC	᷼
Modifier Breve With Inverted Breve	꭛	U+AB5B	꭛
Latin Capital Letter A With Inverted Breve	Ȃ	U+0202	Ȃ
Latin Small Letter A With Inverted Breve	ȃ	U+0203	ȃ
Latin Capital Letter E With Inverted Breve	Ȇ	U+0206	Ȇ
Latin Small Letter E With Inverted Breve	ȇ	U+0207	ȇ
Latin Capital Letter I With Inverted Breve	Ȋ	U+020A	Ȋ
Latin Small Letter I With Inverted Breve	ȋ	U+020B	ȋ
Latin Capital Letter O With Inverted Breve	Ȏ	U+020E	Ȏ
Latin Small Letter O With Inverted Breve	ȏ	U+020F	ȏ
Latin Capital Letter R With Inverted Breve	Ȓ	U+0212	Ȓ
Latin Small Letter R With Inverted Breve	ȓ	U+0213	ȓ
Latin Capital Letter U With Inverted Breve	Ȗ	U+0216	Ȗ
Latin Small Letter U With Inverted Breve	ȗ	U+0217	ȗ

In LaTeX the control \textroundcap{o} puts an inverted breve over the letter o.[2]

Notes

1. Herbert Weir Smyth. Greek Grammar. par. 20 a: semivowels.
2. "LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists". Retrieved 2010-09-23.

See also

• Tie (typography)

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents