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A diacritic – also diacritical mark, diacritical point, or diacritical sign – is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek ''διακριτικός'' (''diakritikós'', "distinguishing"), which is composed of the ancient Greek ''διά'' (''diá'', through) and ''κρίνω'' (''krínein'' or ''kríno'', to separate). ''Diacritic'' is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas ''diacritical'' is only ever an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called ''accents''. Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritical marks in the Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Examples from English are the diaereses in ''naïve'' and ''Noël'', which show that the vowel with the diaeresis mark is pronounced separately from the preceding vowel; the acute and grave accents, which can indicate that a final vowel is to be pronounced, as in ''saké'' and poetic ''breathèd''; and the cedilla under the "c" in the borrowed French word ''façade'', which shows it is pronounced rather than . In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French ''là'' ("there") versus ''la'' ("the"), which are both pronounced . In Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other alphabetic systems, diacritical marks may perform other functions. Vowel pointing systems, namely the Arabic harakat ( ـَ, ـُ, ـُ, etc.) and the Hebrew niqqud ( etc.) systems, indicate sounds (vowels and tones) that are not conveyed by the basic alphabet. The Indic virama ( ् etc.) and the Arabic sukūn ( ـْـ ) mark the absence of a vowel. Cantillation marks indicate prosody. Other uses include the Early Cyrillic titlo ( ◌҃ ) and the Hebrew gershayim ( ״ ), which, respectively, mark abbreviations or acronyms, and Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals. In the Hanyu Pinyin official romanization system for Chinese, diacritics are used to mark the tones of the syllables in which the marked vowels occur. In orthography and collation, a letter modified by a diacritic may be treated either as a new, distinct letter or as a letter–diacritic combination. This varies from language to language, and may vary from case to case within a language. In some cases, letters are used as "in-line diacritics", with the same function as ancillary glyphs, in that they modify the sound of the letter preceding them, as in the case of the "h" in the English pronunciation of "sh" and "th".〔Henry Sweet (1877) ''A Handbook of Phonetics'', p 174–175: "Even letters with accents and diacritics () being only cast for a few founts, act practically as new letters. () We may consider the h in sh and th simply as a diacritic written for convenience on a line with the letter it modifies."〕 ==Types== Among the types of diacritic used in alphabets based on the Latin script are: * accents (so called because the acute, grave, and circumflex were originally used to indicate different types of pitch accents in the polytonic transcription of Greek) * *(unicode:◌́) – acute (Latin ''apex'') * *(unicode:◌̀) – grave * *(unicode:◌̂) – circumflex * *(unicode:◌̌) – caron, wedge (Czech ''háček'') * *(unicode:◌̋) – double acute * *(unicode:◌̏) – double grave * *(unicode:◌ ͂) - perispomene * dots * *(unicode:◌̇) – overdot (Indic ''anusvara'') * *(unicode:◌̣) – an underdot is used in Rheinische Dokumenta and in Hebrew, Indic and Arabic transcription * *(unicode:◌·◌) – interpunct * * tittle, the superscript dot of the modern lowercase Latin ''i'' and ''j'' * *(unicode:◌̈) – typically used as either a diaeresis or an umlaut, but also used for other purposes. * *(unicode:◌ː) – triangular colon, used in the IPA to mark long vowels. * ring * *(unicode:◌̊) – overring * vertical stroke * * (unicode:◌̩) – a subscript vertical stroke is used in IPA to mark syllabicity and in Rheinische Dokumenta to mark a schwa * macron or horizontal line * *(unicode:◌̄) – macron * *(unicode:◌̱) – underbar * overlays * *(unicode:◌⃓) – vertical bar through the character * *(unicode:◌̷) – slash through the character * *(unicode:◌̵) – crossbar through the character * curves * *(unicode:◌̆) – breve * *(unicode:◌̑) - inverted breve * *(unicode:◌͗) – sicilicus, a palaeographic diacritic similar to a caron or breve * *(unicode:◌̃) – tilde * *(unicode:◌҃) – titlo * superscript curls * *(unicode:◌̓) – apostrophe * *(unicode:◌̉) – hoi (Vietnamese ''dấu hỏi'') * *(unicode:◌̛) – horn (Vietnamese ''dấu móc'') * subscript curls * *(unicode:◌̦) – undercomma * *(unicode:◌̧) – cedilla * *(unicode:◌̡ ◌̢) – hook, left or right, sometimes superscript * *(unicode:◌̨) – ogonek * double marks (over or under two base characters) * * (unicode:◌͝◌) – double breve * * (unicode:◌͡◌) – tie bar or top ligature * * (unicode:◌᷍◌) – double circumflex * * (unicode:◌͞◌) – longum * * (unicode:◌͠◌) – double tilde * double (subscript curls) * * (unicode:◌̧ ̧) - double cedilla * * (unicode:◌̨ ̨) - double ogonek * * (unicode:◌̈ ̈) - double diaeresis The tilde, dot, comma, titlo, apostrophe, bar, and colon are sometimes diacritical marks, but also have other uses. Not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, but occurs at the beginning of the word, as in the dialects ''’Bulengee'' and ''’Dolimi''. Because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word. In abugida scripts, like those used to write Hindi and Thai, diacritics indicate vowels, and may occur above, below, before, after, or around the consonant letter they modify. The tittle (dot) on the letter ''i'' of the Latin alphabet originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish ''i'' from the minims (downstrokes) of adjacent letters. It first appeared in the 11th century in the sequence ''ii'' (as in ''ingeníí)'', then spread to ''i'' adjacent to ''m, n, u'', and finally to all lowercase ''is. The ''j'', originally a variant of ''i'', inherited the tittle. The shape of the diacritic developed from initially resembling today's acute accent to a long flourish by the 15th century. With the advent of Roman type it was reduced to the round dot we have today.〔OED〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Diacritic」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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