Circumflex Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.
- In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î, ô, and û. It is largely redundant. It marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word. For example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest). However, in the case of ô (as well as â and ê in most dialects), it changes the value of the vowel: cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "coast") are not homonyms.
- In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA: β), hence the name of the country Malaŵi;.
- In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and 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 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".
- In English, the circumflex is sometimes used on loanwords; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century, which was before the cheap penny post and a 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". This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not. And it is a precursor of the ways in which trendy young people nowadays abbreviate text messages.
- In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.
- In Slovak, circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter "o" into a diphtong ô [uo].
- In Vietnamese, the circumflex helps to distinguish three couples of vowels : ô [o][ and o ]ɔ[;], ê [e][ and e ]ɛ[;], â ɐ; and a ɑ;. It is not a tonal mark, so that you can for instance find association of circumflex and tonal mark, like ệ, which appears in the word Việt Nam
- In Kunrei-shiki romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It is also occasionally used as a surrogate for the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.
- In Welsh the circumflex (to bach -- "little roof") is used on the vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y to differentiate between other words that have the same spelling. The circumflex in Welsh gives a vowel a long sound, for example môr versus mor.
- In Portuguese, it is used on â, ê and ô. It mainly marks the tonic syllable, but sometimes it is used to distinguish homophone words, e.g. tem (he has) and têm (they have).
- in Italian it is used in plurals of singulars ending with ...io, thus ending them with a longer i, in modern Italian this is accomplished with a double or just a single i as in varî, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).
The circumflex receives its English name from the Latin circumflexus (bent about).