Palatal hook

The palatal hook (  ̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants.[1] It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc.

N with palatal hook, followed by eng, a palatal nasal and a retroflex n for comparison.

The IPA recommended that esh (ʃ) and ezh (ʒ) not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ʆ and ʓ. However, versions with the hook may have been used by some authors.

The palatal hook was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ƫ becomes tʲ).[1]

Palatal hooks are also used in Lithuanian dialectology by the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet).[2] and in the orthography of Nez Perce.

Computer encoding

Unicode includes both a combining character for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including superscript letters with palatal hooks.

While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest were not added until 2005 or later. As such, font support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.

Appearance	Code point	Name
̡	U+0321	COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW
ᶀ	U+1D80	LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ꞔ	U+A7C4	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞔ	U+A794	LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶁ	U+1D81	LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶂ	U+1D82	LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶃ	U+1D83	LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞕ	U+A795	LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶄ	U+1D84	LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶅ	U+1D85	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶪ	U+1DAA	MODIFIER LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶆ	U+1D86	LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶇ	U+1D87	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶈ	U+1D88	LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶉ	U+1D89	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶊ	U+1D8A	LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶋ	U+1D8B	LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ƫ	U+01AB	LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶵ	U+1DB5	MODIFIER LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶌ	U+1D8C	LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶍ	U+1D8D	LATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ᶎ	U+A7C6	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶎ	U+1D8E	LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK

References

1. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
2. Tumasonis, Vladas; Pentzlin, Karl (2011-05-24). "N4070: Second revised proposal to add characters used in Lithuanian dialectology to the UCS" (PDF). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.