Ṩ

When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct ( · ), or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' (  ̇ ) and 'combining dot below' (  ̣ ) which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in Central European languages and Vietnamese.

[edit] Overdot

See also: Anusvara

Language scripts or transcription schemes that use the dot above a letter as a diacritical mark:

• In Arabic romanization, ġ stands for the letter ghayin.
• Traditional Irish typography, where the dot denotes lenition, and is called a ponc séimhithe or buailte "dot of lenition": ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ. Alternatively, lenition may be represented by a following letter h, thus: bh ch dh fh gh mh ph st th. In Old Irish orthography, the dot was used only for ḟ ṡ, while the following h was used for ch ph th; lenition of other letters was not indicated. Later the two systems spread to the entire set of lenitable consonants and competed with each other. Eventually the standard practice was to use the dot when writing in Gaelic script and the following h when writing in antiqua. Thus ċ and ch represent the same phonetic element in Modern Irish.
• Lithuanian: ė
• Maltese: ċ ġ ż
• Polish: ż
• The dot above lowercase i and j (and uppercase İ in Turkish) is not regarded as an independent diacritic, but rather as an integral part of the letter. It is called a tittle.

The overdot is also used in the Devanagari script, where it is called anusvara.

In mathematics and physics the dot denotes the time derivative as in .

[edit] Underdot

• In IAST and National Library at Calcutta romanization, transcribing Indic languages, a dot below a letter indicates retroflex consonants, while an underdot signifies an emphatic consonant.

• In romanizations of Semitic languages, a dot below a consonant is used to indicate emphatic consonants. For example, ṣ represents an emphatic s.
  • Ḍ
  • Ṛ
  • Ṣ
  • Ṭ
  • Ẓ

• Asturian uses Ḷḷ for western Asturian transcriptions for the voiced retroflex plosive. Asturian also uses Ḥ for the voiceless glottal fricative.
• Ḍ is also used in the O'odham language.
• Vietnamese. The nặng tone (low, glottal) is represented with a dot below the base vowel: ạ ặ ậ ẹ ệ ị ọ ộ ợ ụ ự ỵ.
• In Yoruba, the dot is used below the o, the e and the s: those three letters can also occur without dot as another letter.

The underdot is also used in the Devanagari script, where it is called anunaasika.

[edit] Technical notes

The Overdot diacritic (Unicode combining diacritic "combining dot above" U+0307  ̇ ).

Precomposed characters: Ȧ, Ḃ, Ċ, Ḋ, Ė, Ḟ, Ġ, Ḣ, İ, Ṁ, Ṅ, Ȯ, Ṗ, Ṙ, Ṡ, Ṫ, Ẇ, Ẋ, Ẏ, Ż.

[edit] See also

• Ȧ
• Anunaasika
• Chandrabindu
• Tittle
• Turkish dotted and dotless I

[edit] External links

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