Circumflex

The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a "caret", or a "hat") is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans, Naliuhn, and other languages, and formerly in Turkish. The circumflex is also used in southern dialect of English around the New-Orleans area. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent about)--a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (perispomene).

Â	â
Ê	ê
Î	î
Ô	ô
Û	û

Length

The circumflex accent marks a long vowel in the orthography or transliteration of several languages.

In the transliteration of Akkadian, it is used to indicate a long vowel resulting from an aleph contraction.

In French, the circumflex is used on â, ê, î, ô, û, and, in some varieties of the language, such as in Belgian pronunciation, these vowels are often long; fête (party) is longer than fait (fact).

In standard Friulian it is used on each of the five vowels to mark that vowel as long; since long vowels are a typical feature of Friulian, the circumflex is used a lot.

In Jèrriais, the circumflex also marks a long vowel.

In Kunrei-shiki Romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It is also occasionally used as a surrogate for the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.

In Welsh language, the circumflex accent gives a vowel a long sound, for example môr (sea) versus mor (as / comparative particle).

In Turkish, until recently, the modern (Latin-based) Turkish alphabet introduced in the time of Kemal Atatürk used the circumflex accent to indicate when a vowel was to be pronounced in a way more native (usually by stretching it out somewhat) to Farsi and Arabic. Words featuring such an accent, such as kâtib ("scribe"), ilâhî ("divine"), or Kâmile (a woman's name) are generally loanwords distinguishable from true Turkish words, and were represented easily in the Arabic script used in the Ottoman Turkish language.

Other regular uses

In Afrikaans it simply marks a vowel with an irregular pronunciation, without indicating precisely what this pronunciation might be. Examples of circumflex use in Afrikaans are sê (to say), wêreld (world), môre (tomorrow) and brûe (bridges).

In Bulgarian when transliterated with the Latin alphabet The sound represented in Bulgarian by â, although called a schwa (misleadingly suggesting an unstressed lax sound), is a vowel in its own right. Unlike English or French, but similar to Romanian and Afrikaans, it can be stressed. The Cyrillic letter 'ъ' (er goljam) is often transliterated as â or sometimes as an 'ŭ', often it is just written as 'a' or 'u'.

In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative , hence the name of the country Malaŵi.

In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ. It indicates a completely different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collation. See Esperanto orthography.

In French, it generally marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word – for example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest). Since the older spelling is often one on which English words are based, as in these two foregoing examples, the circumflex provides a helpful guide to Anglophone readers of French. Fenêtre (window), for instance, is derived from the Latin word fenestra. Certain close homophones are distinguished by the circumflex, for instance cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "rib" or "coast"). The letter ê is also normally pronounced open, like è. In the usual pronunciations of central and northern France, ô is pronounced close, like eau; in Southern France, no distinction is made between close and open o. See Use of the circumflex in French.

In Greek, the circumflex occurs (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels, and where there is a rise and then a fall in tone in Ancient Greek. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, sometimes taking a form similar to a tilde, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.

In pinyin romanized Mandarin Chinese, the circumflex occurs only on ê, which is used to represent the sound /ε/ in isolation. This sound occurs rarely and is only used as an exclamation.

Portuguese and Vietnamese use the circumflex accent on certain high vowels, or, more precisely, on vowels pronounced higher than the default low vowels. For example, Vietnamese contrasts phonemically the low vowels a href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Open back unrounded vowel">, e href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Open-mid front unrounded vowel">, o href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Open-mid back rounded vowel"> with the high vowels â href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Near-open central vowel">, ê href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Close-mid front unrounded vowel">, and ô href="http://articles.gourt.com/en/Close-mid back rounded vowel">o. It is not a tonal mark, so that you can for instance have a circumflex and a tonal mark on the same vowel, like in ệ, which appears in the word Việt Nam. In Portuguese, the circumflex further indicates that the vowel is stressed.

In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark the vowel , similar to Russian yery. The names of these accented letters are "â din a" and "î din i", respectively. Note: the letter â appears only in the middle of words; thus, its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.

In Slovak, circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter "o" into a diphthong ô //.

In Turkish, until recently (see above), the circumflex was used to indicate when a preceding consonant (most likely "k") was to be pronounced as the Arabic letter usually transliterated in English with "q" (as in "Iraq" or "suq").

In Welsh the circumflex (colloquially known as the to bach -- "little roof") is used on the vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y to differentiate between other words that have the same spelling.

Exceptional use

In English the circumflex, like other diacriticals, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century--before the cheap penny post and an era in which paper was taxed--the circumflex was used in postal letters to save room in an analogy with the French use. Specifically, the letters "ugh" were replaced when they were silent in the most common words, e.g., "thô" for "though", "thorô" for "thorough", and "brôt" for "brought" — similar to the way in which people today abbreviate words in text messages. This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not.

In Italian it is used in plurals of singulars ending with -io, thus ending them with a longer i. In modern Italian this is accomplished with a double or just a single i as in varî, varj, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).

In Norwegian, it is used, with the exception of loan words, on ô and ê, almost exclusively in the words "fôr" (from Norse fóðr), meaning "animal food", lêr, meaning "skin" (Norse leðr) and "vêr" (Norse veðr), meaning "weather".

In science

The circumflex (or caret) character is used to represent exponentiation in ASCII: 2^3 = 8.

The circumflex (or caret) character is used to represent xor in ANSI C (and other languages based on C, like JavaScript and PHP): 2^3 = 1.

In statistics, a caret over the name of a variable represents an estimator.

In mathematics, a caret over a letter represents a unit vector.

The circumflex (or caret) character is also used in Regular Expressions.

In typography

A caret is used by editors to indicate on a Proof#Noun where something should be inserted. It is placed below the line in question for a line-level punctuation mark (e.g., a comma) or above for a higher character (e.g., an apostrophe). The material to be inserted can be placed inside the caret, in the margin, or opposite the caret above the word.

A caret is also used to center characters vertically. In such cases carets are placed both under and above the character facing opposite directions.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters â, ê, î, ô, û, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also uses the circumflex as a combining character.

External links

Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer

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