breve

A breve (pronounced /ˈbriːv/, /ˈbrɛv/; from the Latin brevis "short, brief") is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It looks similar to the caron (i.e. wedge or háček in Czech), 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. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet uses a breve for Ӂ (the equivalent of G before E or I in the Latin script). In Chuvash, a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (E-breve).

In Esperanto it is used above the U to form a non-syllabic U, similar to English W in sound.

In the transcription of Sinhala, the breve over m or n indicates a prenasalized consonant, e.g. n̆da is used to represent [ⁿda].

Other uses

In other languages, it is used for other purposes.

• In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the schwa (ə) vowel, as in măr (apple).
• 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 [ɡ] 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]
• H-breve below Ḫ ḫ is used to transliterate the Arabic character Ḫāʾ (‎ﺥ‎) in DIN 31635. It is also used to transliterate Akkadian, Hittite cuneiform, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Note that Pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese, although breve can be used instead of caron as a substitute.

Encoding breves

Unicode and HTML numeric entities for breve letters

• Combining breve symbol has U+0306 code.

In LaTeX the control \u{o} puts a breve over the letter o.

Notes

See also

• Caron
• Macron

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents