DIACRITICAL MARK or SIGN, or DIA CRITIC (Gk. AlatcpProolc, dinkritiko.c, distinc tive, from diaxpirtte, diekrinein. to distinguish, from 514, (lig, through Kpivriv, krinrin, to judge). A mark or sign used to il1stil4otish dif ferent sounds or rallies of the same letter Or character. such as those used in indicating the pronunciation or accent in this EneyelupAia. Such marks or signs may arise. (a) as a degra dation or gradual corruption of sonic combina tion of previously used characters as in the ease of the Germ an umlauted vowels, or (b) they may be deliberately invented or some special purpose, as in most of the systems used for phonetic respelling in works of refer ence or in philological works.
Some of those in the first class were developed by writing one letter above. as a means of saving time or space, especially at the end of a line, when books were made by copying by band. Thus the German ii, il, ii were originally h, o, Li. and the superior letters were, for convenience sake, re duced to two dots. So the Swedish it or A was originally ao or Ao, written with the o over the a or A, this o being finally changed into a simple circle. The cedilla (literally, little zed or z), on the other hand, is a degradation of a variant form or of the letter z, which was formerly written after the letter c to show that it was to be pronounced like s, when without time cedilla it would have had the sound of k. It is now chiefly used in French and Portuguese words. The number of these diacritical marks resulting from degraded forms now or formerly employed in the various civilized languages is very large: but most of those now in use have either lost their primitive meaning or are of forgotten origin. To the class of arbitrarily in vented or chosen diacritical marks belong most of those now in use in the alphabets of the civil ized nations or races, such as those used in pho netic respelling and those used in the ordinary alphabets of many European nations whose alphabets have become fixed during comparative ly recent times, as in the various Slavic alpha bets, the Hungarian alphabet, etc. The points used in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, as well as those used in Avestan, are arbitrary in ventions used to indicate the vowels or modifica tions of the consonantal sounds of the original characters.
The diacritical marks which occur in the print ing of common English words are the diaeresis [•.], the hyphen [-], the cedilla [el, the acute
accent [']. the' grave accent and the tilde By some authors the letter h when written after e or s or t is treated as a simple diacritic, al though it is not properly a diacritical mark. The di•resis is a survival of the Greek use of two dots over c or v to show that they did not form a diphthong with the preceding vowel. It is used in the same way in English. The tilde is used in English only over foreign-derived words. as in the word canon. is.a degradation or cor ruption of the letter n, which was formerly in dicated in many words by making the sign -, or even a straight mark [ -] over the preceding letter, as aEo = anon. When final -ed is to be pronounced contrary to the usual rule. the fact is usually indicated by using the grave or acute accent, thus reachM, and in the same way the fact that a final c is to be pronounced is often indicated; thus, BranD% The hyphen sometime-, serves the purpose of the as in re•cnfiv. Some of the characters used in phonetic respell ing have by long usage become mom or less fixed in signifieance: thus the signs are cally always used to denote long and short sounds respettIVI lc; and the sign lsu a mall denotes a lung as it did in ;reek. In malty mod cm English -et: Mine works the acute accent I. isrd to iit.o”1,• a short accented and the grave accent [s]i,-- u•ed to denote a long ac rowel. No the schen:, of diacritical marks used in tai• Encycl: p:cdia is in very general use to indicate the -mind, here denoted them, being essentially the -aloe as those employed in \ ele.ter's International Dictionary. and in vari ous other preceding or abridged edition, of the same work. and in the majority of the school books of the country. The system of the Century Dictionary is in many respect, quite different ; and that of the _neat English dictionary edited by 1)r. ,Iiirray 1.1 :•11• English Ilictionary on His torical is still different. and ex remely complex. The system used by the nil ard Dictionary eontains fewer diacritical marks. the differentiation being obtained by the 11,e of the alphabet arbitrarily devised anti selected for use by the _lin:Tic:in Philological .',see the articles PlIONETles; PitoNtiNct.yrioN, ete., and for the various diacritical marks em ployed in any language, consult a grammar of that language.