Information About ®Macron |
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| diacritics | |
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A macron, from Gr . μακρός (''makros'') meaning "large", is a Diacritic ¯ placed over a Vowel originally to indicate that the vowel is Long . The opposite is a Breve ˘, used to indicate a short vowel. These distinctions are usually Phonemic . In modern Old English transliterations, the macron has been used in this way. In Latvian , A-macron , E-macron, I-macron and U-macron are considered separate letters that sort in alphabetical order immediately after A, E, I, U respectively. For instance, ''baznīca'' comes before ''bārda'' in a Latvian dictionary. In Lithuanian , U-macron is also considered a separate letter. Ū is the only letter that shows a prolonged vowel; other long vowels are used with Ogonek (no longer nasal): Ą, Ę, Į, Ų and O being always long vowel in Lithuanian words except for international words. In Pinyin , macrons are used over a, e, i, o, u, ü (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ǖ) to indicate the first Tone of Mandarin Chinese . It does not indicate vowel length in any way. In the International Phonetic Alphabet , macron over a vowel indicates a mid-level tone, and not length. In Hawaiian (where it is known as the ''kahakō'') it is again used to indicate long vowels, which in turn influence the placement of accent stress in words. In mark instead (e.g. "Mäori" instead of "Māori") when a macron is not available, and this confuses people who are unfamiliar with either. The Māori for macron is ''pōtae'', "hat". It is also used in many dictionaries and textbooks to mark vowel length in languages that do not feature this diacritic in everyday use; for example it is used in the Hepburn transcription of Japanese to indicate a long vowel, as in ''kōtsū'' (交通) "traffic" as opposed to ''kotsu'' (骨) "bone" or "knack (fig.)". The indigenous Japanese Kana transcription of 交通, however, is こうつう, which character for character transliterates as ''koutsuu''. Although not standard, this latter system is arguably the most commonly seen on the Internet, next to not marking vowel length at all. The macron is often used in modern Latin dictionaries to mark vowel length, in conjunction with the breve. In some German handwriting styles, a macron is used to distinguish ''u'' from ''n''. In the French comic books which are hand-lettered all in capitals, the macron replaces the Circumflex . In Russian Handwriting , a macron is often used over a lowercase ''т'' to distinguish it from ''Ш''. A handwritten lowercase Russian ''т''—which is lowercase Cyrillic ''Т'', not an ''М''—thus looks like an English lowercase ''m'' with a macron. Some utilize a macron underneath the letter ''ш'', as well. In Unicode , "combining macron" is one of the Combining Diacritical Mark s, its code is U+0304 (in HTML , ̄ or ̄). This should be distinguished from the "macron" at U+00AF ¯, from the "modifier letter macron" at U+02C9 ˉ and from the combining Overline at U+0305 ̅. There are also several Precomposed Character s; their HTML / Unicode numbers are as in the table to the right. In LaTeX a macron is created with the command "\=" for example: M\=aori. If the last two rows of the table do not display properly, the row before the last is the letter Uu with Diaeresis (Ü ü) ''and'' macron, used in Pinyin . The final row is the letter Yy with macron, used sometimes in teaching Latin . In older handwriting styles, such as the German Schrift , the macron over an ''m'' or an ''n'' meant that the letter was doubled. This continued into print in English in the sixteenth century. Over a ''u'' at the end of a word, the macron indicated ''um'' as a form of Scribal Abbreviation . EXTERNAL LINKS |
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