Double acute accent

The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. Consequently, it is also known as Hungarumlaut.^[1] The signs formed with diacritic marks count as letters of their own right in the Hungarian alphabet.

Difference between ö and ő and ü and ű respectively in Hungarian handwriting

[edit] In Hungarian

Standard Hungarian has 14 vowels in a symmetrical system: seven short vowels (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written in the case of a, e, i, o, u with an acute accent, and in the case of ö, ü with the double acute (instead of using trema+acute). (Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it has a lexical and grammatical distinctive function.)

The double acute acts as combined acute with a diaeresis, giving the longer counterparts of ö and ü.

[edit] History

Length marks first appeared in the Hungarian orthography in the 15th century under the influence of the Hussite orthography. Initially, only á and é were marked as these two vowels have a noticeable qualitative difference in addition to the quantitative one. Later í, ó, ú were marked as well, but up to the 18th century length marks were not used for ö and ü. In the 18th century, still before the Hungarian typography was fixed, the trema+acute form (ǘ) was used in some printed documents. The double-acute version was found to be a more esthetic solution and introduced by 19th century typographers.

[edit] Cyrillic alphabet

The Chuvash language written in the Cyrillic alphabet extends the basic Cyrillic alphabet by several new letters, among them the by Ӳ, ӳ which is the Cyrillic letter U with double acute accent representing the sound /y/. The double acute accent probably found its way by analogy from Latin script languages (probably German) — cf. ger. u /u/ ~ ü /y/ to chuv. у /u/ ~ ӳ /y/^[2] — via its handwritten form^[3].

[edit] International Phonetic Alphabet

The tonal marking system in IPA (and many other phonetic alphabets) is the following (demonstrated with an 'e'):

One may encounter this use as a tone sign in some IPA-derived orthographies of small languages, such as in the North American Native Tanacross (Athapascan). In line with the IPA usage it denotes the extra-high tone.

[edit] Other uses

Much less significant uses of this diacritic are the following cases:

[edit] Slovak Phonetics

At the beginning of 20th century, the letter A̋ a̋ (A with double acute) has seen some marginal use as a long variant of the short vowel Ä ä (A with diaeresis), representing the vowel /æː/ in some loanwords.

This use clearly derives from the Hungarian use the double acute accent as the long counterpart of the umlaut/diaraesis, but fits well into the Slovak system, where long vowels are marked with an acute accent similarly to Hungarian and Czech.

The letter is still used for this purpose in Slovak phonetic transcription system(s).

[edit] Handwriting

In several Latin script languages where umlaut/diaraesis is used, but double acute accent is not (i.e., there is no danger of mixing them up) handwriting umlaut may look like double acute accent. This is known for German and Swedish. Some Faroese handwritings uses ő in place of Faroese ø to differentiate from ö.

An example of ő used on a Faroese street sign

[edit] Technical notes

Hungarian language
Alphabet, including ő ű and cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs
Phonetics and phonology
Vowel harmony
Grammar (Noun phrases · Verbs)
T-V distinction
Regulatory body
Hungarian names
Language history (Sound correspondences)
Tongue-twisters
Hungarian pronunciation of English Old Hungarian script English words from Hungarian
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O and U with double acute accents are supported in the ISO 8859-2 and Unicode character sets.

[edit] ISO 8859-2

In ISO 8859-2 Ő, ő, Ű, ű take the place of some similar looking (but distinct, especially at bigger font sizes) letters of ISO 8859-1.

[edit] Unicode

All occurrences of "double acute" in the Unicode 4.1 standard:

Note, that the last entry is unrelated to the others above, and got its name purely by analogy of its shape.

[edit] LaTeX Input

In LaTeX, the double acute accent is typeset with the \H{} (mnemonic for Hungarian) command. For example, the name Paul Erdős would be typeset as

Paul Erd\H{o}s.

[edit] X11 Input

In modern X11 system, the double acute can be typed by pressing the Compose key followed by = (the equal sign) and desired letter (o or u).

[edit] See also

• Hungarian alphabet
• Acute accent
• Double grave accent
• Umlaut/Diaeresis

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

Look up ő, ű in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (contains some incorrect/sloppy data on history)