Discover

Â	â
Ĉ	ĉ
Ê	ê
Ĝ	ĝ
Ĥ	ĥ
Î	î
Ĵ	ĵ
Ô	ô
Ŝ	ŝ
Û	û
Ŵ	ŵ
Ŷ	ŷ

The 'circumflex' ('ˆ') (often also called a "caret", from a non-diacritical sign with similar shape (^); also "hat" or "uppen") is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Frisian, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Romanized Japanese, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans, Turkish and other languages. It received its English name from Latin ''circumflexus'' (''bent about'')—a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (''perispomene'').

Contents

Pitch

Length

Letter extension

Height

Other regular uses

Exceptional use

In science

In typography

Technical notes

See also

External links

Pitch

The circumflex accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels, and where there was a rise and then a fall in pitch. Sometimes it took the form of a tilde. Since Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, this diacritic has been replaced with an acute accent mark in the modern monotonic orthography.

Length

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

★ Akkadian. In the transliteration of this language, the circumflex indicates a long vowel resulting from an aleph contraction.

★ 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". See also below.

★ Standard Friulian.

★ Japanese. In the Kunrei-shiki system of Romanization, and occasionally in the Hepburn system (as a surrogate for the macron).

★ Jèrriais.

★ Turkish. According to Turkish Language Association orthography, ''düzeltme işareti'' ("correction mark")[1] over ''a'' and ''u'' is primarily (see below) used to indicate a long vowel on a basis of disambiguation. For example ''ama'' (but) against ''âmâ'' (blind), ''şura'' (that place, there) against ''şûra'' (council). Although official, the required system is complex and younger generations gradually decline using it.

★ Welsh. The circumflex is colloquially known as the ''to bach'' — "little roof". It gives a vowel (''a, e, i, o, u, w, y'') a long sound, and is used particularly to differentiate between homographs, e.g. ''tan'' and ''tân'', ''ffon'' and ''ffôn'', ''pin'' and ''pîn'', ''gem'' and ''gêm'', ''cyn'' and ''cŷn'', or ''gwn'' and ''gŵn''.

Letter extension

★ 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 more accurately described as a mid back unrounded vowel . 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 a '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 pinyin romanized Mandarin Chinese, the circumflex occurs only on ''ê'', which is used to represent the sound in isolation. This sound occurs rarely and is only used as an exclamation.

★ 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, the circumflex (''vokáň'') turns the letter ''o'' into a diphthong ''ô'' .

Height

In Portuguese and Vietnamese, the circumflex indicates the relative height of some vowels:

★ Portuguese ''â'' , ''ê'' , and ''ô'' are higher vowels than ''á'' , ''é'' , and ''ó'' , respectively. The circumflex is only used on stressed vowels.

★ Vietnamese ''â'' , ''ê'' , and ''ô'' are higher vowels than ''a'' , ''e'' , and ''o'' . The circumflex can appear together with a tone mark on the same vowel, as in the word ''Việt Nam''.

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 French, it generally marks the former presence of the letter ''s'' in the spelling of the word – for example, ''hôpital'' (hospital), ''forêt'' (forest), ''rôtir'' (to roast), ''côte'' (coast), ''pâte'' (paste). Since the older spelling is often one on which English words are based, as in the 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'' ("level", "mark") and ''côte'' ("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 also Use of the circumflex in French.

★ In Old Tupi, the circumflex indicated a semivowel.

★ In Turkish, the circumflex over ''a'' and ''u'' is used to indicate when a preceding consonant ("k", "g", "l") is to be pronounced as a palatal plosive; , (''kâğıt'', ''gâvur'', ''mahkûm'', ''Gülgûn'') or alveolar lateral (''Elâzığ'', ''Halûk''). The circumflex over ''i'' is used to indicate a nisba suffix (''millî'', ''dinî'').

★ In Welsh, the circumflex, apart from being used as a lengthening sign (see above), is sometimes used with plural forms, notably where the singular ends in an ''a'', to indicate the stressed syllable (which would normally be on the penultimate syllable), e.g. ''camera'', ''drama'', ''opera'', ''sinema'' → ''camerâu'', ''dramâu'', ''operâu'', ''sinemâu''.

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, ''î'' is sometimes used in the plural of nouns and adjectives ending with ''-io'' , although the spelling with a normal ''i'' is by far the most usual one. Other possible spellings are ''-ii'' and obsolete ''-j'' or ''-ij''. For example, the plural of ''vario'' ("various") can be spelt ''vari'', ''varî'', ''varii''; the pronunciation will usually stay with only one .

★ 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", both ''lêr'' and ''vêr'' only in the Nynorsk Norwegian.

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 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.

See also

★ Caret

★ Tilde

★ Macron

★ Caron

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