Breve
| Ă | ă |
| Ắ | ắ |
| Ằ | ằ |
| Ẳ | ẳ |
| Ẵ | ẵ |
| Ặ | ặ |
| Ĕ | ĕ |
| Ḝ | ḝ |
| Ğ | ğ |
| Ḫ | ḫ |
| Ĭ | ĭ |
| Ŏ | ŏ |
| Ŭ | ŭ |
A breve (Template:Pron-en, Template:IPAlink-en; from the Latin brevis "short, brief") is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It looks similar to caron (a.k.a. wedge or háček), but the caron has a sharp tip, whilst the breve is rounded. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve).
Length
The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯ which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek and some other languages, such as Tuareg. (However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only – but all – the long vowels: it is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short.)
In the Cyrillic alphabet, a breve is used for Й (a semivowel I). In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (semivowel U) and in the Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. In the Chuvash a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (Ye-breve).
In Esperanto it is used above the U to form a non-syllabic U, similar to English W in sound.
Other uses
In other languages, it is used for other purposes.
- G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, Ğ/ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish, but may be pronounced as /g/ in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.
- The breve, together with circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.
- The McCune-Reischauer Romanization of the Korean hangul script uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate the vowels ㅓ (ŏ) and ㅡ (ŭ).[1]
Note that Pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese.
Encoding breves
Unicode and HTML numeric entities for breve letters
| In Latin, Cyrillic and Greek |
|
|---|---|
| In Early Cyrillic | |
| In Indic | |
| In other scripts | |
| Marks used as diacritics |
|
| Non-diacritic uses | |
| In Unicode |
|
| Name | Letter | Unicode | HTML Entity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | ||||
| A-breve | Ă ă | U+0102 U+0103 | Ă ă | |
| E-breve | Ĕ ĕ | U+0114 U+0115 | Ĕ ĕ | |
| I-breve | Ĭ ĭ | U+012C U+012D | Ĭ ĭ | |
| O-breve | Ŏ ŏ | U+014E U+014F | Ŏ ŏ | |
| U-breve | Ŭ ŭ | U+016C U+016D | Ŭ ŭ | |
| Azerbaijani, Tatar, Turkish | ||||
| G-breve | Ğ ğ | U+011E U+011F | Ğ ğ | |
| Vietnamese | ||||
| A-Sắc-breve | Ắ ắ | U+1EAE U+1EAF | Ắ ắ | |
| A-Huyền-breve | Ằ ằ | U+1EB0 U+1EB1 | Ằ ằ | |
| A-Hỏi-breve | Ẳ ẳ | U+1EB2 U+1EB3 | Ẳ ẳ | |
| A-Ngã-breve | Ẵ ẵ | U+1EB4 U+1EB5 | Ẵ ẵ | |
| A-Nặng-breve | Ặ ặ | U+1EB6 U+1EB7 | Ặ ặ | |
| Cyrillic | ||||
| Short I | Й й | U+0419 U+0439 | Й й | |
| U short | Ў ў | U+040E U+045E | Ў ў | |
| A-breve | Ӑ ӑ | U+04D0 U+04D1 | Ӑ ӑ | |
| Ye-breve | Ӗ ӗ | U+04D6 U+04D7 | Ӗ ӗ | |
- Combining breve symbol has U+0306 code.
Notes
- ^ For example, that word 한글 han-geul is Romanized in McCune-Reischauer as han'gŭl.The spelling han-geul is based on South Korea's Revised Romanization of Korean adopted in 2000 in part for ease in computer use, not on McCune-Reischauer. It is common, for convenience, to omit writing all diacritical marks in McCune Reishchauer including breves, in which case the word is spelled hangul not han'gŭl. North Korea uses a variant of McCune-Reischauer that also utilizes breves for those two vowels.