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Ring (diacritic)

 

 
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Ring (diacritic)
 
 
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A ring diacritic
Diacritic

A diacritic is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The term derives from the Greek language d?a???t???? ....
 may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters
Letter (alphabet)

A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language....
 of the extended Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
s in various contexts.

Danish
Danish language

Danish is one of the North Germanic languages , a sub-group of the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language....
, Norwegian
Norwegian language

Norwegian is a North Germanic languages language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. It is also spoken as a second language among Norwegian-Americans in the United States of America, especially in the central northern states....
, Swedish
Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic languages language, spoken by around 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the ?land islands....
 and Walloon
Walloon language

Walloon is a Romance language spoken as a second language by some in Wallonia, Belgium. It belongs to the langue d'o?l language family, whose most prominent member is the French language, but should not be considered a French dialect: a French speaking person can only understand Walloon with difficulty, especially in its eastern forms....
 character Å
Å

The Letter ? represents various sounds in the Swedish alphabet, Finnish alphabet , Danish alphabet, Norwegian alphabet, North Frisian language, Walloon language, Chamorro language, and Istro-Romanian language alphabets....
 (å) is typically seen as an A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
 with a ring above.






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A ring diacritic
Diacritic

A diacritic is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The term derives from the Greek language d?a???t???? ....
 may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters
Letter (alphabet)

A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language....
 of the extended Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
s in various contexts.
Å
Å

The Letter ? represents various sounds in the Swedish alphabet, Finnish alphabet , Danish alphabet, Norwegian alphabet, North Frisian language, Walloon language, Chamorro language, and Istro-Romanian language alphabets....
 å
?
?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....
 ?
?
?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....
 ?
U
U

U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
 u
  ?
?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....
  ?
?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....


Ring above

The Danish
Danish language

Danish is one of the North Germanic languages , a sub-group of the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language....
, Norwegian
Norwegian language

Norwegian is a North Germanic languages language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. It is also spoken as a second language among Norwegian-Americans in the United States of America, especially in the central northern states....
, Swedish
Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic languages language, spoken by around 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the ?land islands....
 and Walloon
Walloon language

Walloon is a Romance language spoken as a second language by some in Wallonia, Belgium. It belongs to the langue d'o?l language family, whose most prominent member is the French language, but should not be considered a French dialect: a French speaking person can only understand Walloon with difficulty, especially in its eastern forms....
 character Å
Å

The Letter ? represents various sounds in the Swedish alphabet, Finnish alphabet , Danish alphabet, Norwegian alphabet, North Frisian language, Walloon language, Chamorro language, and Istro-Romanian language alphabets....
 (å) is typically seen as an A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
 with a ring above. However, in the languages in which it is used, the letter is seen as a unique symbol, rather than an A with a diacritic.

Other characters with a ring diacritic are U and u (a Latin U
U

U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
 with ring above). These characters are used in the Czech language
Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
 (where the ring is known as a kroužek), together with hácek and cárka (like an acute accent
Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Greek alphabet writing systems....
) above many other letters. This vowel "u" shows how the pronunciation of various words evolved during the centuries. For example, the word "kun" (a horse; pronounced []) used to be written "kón", which evolved, along with pronunciation, into "kuon". Ultimately, the vowel [o] disappeared completely, and it is only kept as the ring above "u". The letters u and ú
U

U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
 have the pronunciation (long [u:]). For historical reasons, u can never be the first letter of the word; however, ú is almost always the first letter of the word or the word root
Root (linguistics)

The root is the primary lexicology unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantics content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
.

The ring is also used in Bolognese (a dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo language) to distinguish the sound // (å) from // (a).

Ring above has been used in Lithuanian
Lithuanian language

Lithuanian is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are about 2.96 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 170,000 abroad....
 Cyrillic alphabet promoted by Russian authorities at the last quarter of 19th century in the letter ? / ?, used to represent the diphthong (now written uo in contemporary Lithuanian orthography).

Many more characters can be created in Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 using the 'combining ring above' U+030A, including the above mentioned (Cyrillic ? with ring above) or even (n with acute and ring above). The standalone ring above symbol has the codepoint U+02DA.

Ring below

Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 encodes "combining ring below" at U+0325 (   ). The diacritic is used in IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
 to indicate voicelessness
Voice (phonetics)

Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sound, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced....
, and in Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies

Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European language , and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their soc...
 to indicate syllabicity
Syllabic consonant

A syllabic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the under-stroke, , at Unicode code point U+329....
 ( corresponding to IPA ).

1E00 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING BELOW
1E01 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING BELOW


Half rings

Half rings also exist as diacritic marks, these are characters U+0351 (combining left half ring above) and U+0357 (combining left half ring below). These characters may be used with the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
. They are here given with the lowercase a: and . These may or may not display correctly in your user agent
User agent

A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web, but other systems such as Session Initiation Protocol use the term user agent to refer to the user's phone....
.

Other, similar signs are in use in Armenian
Armenian language

The 'Armenian language' is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. It is the official language of the Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh....
: the 'left half ring above' U+0559 ( ? ), and the Armenian comma
Comma (punctuation)

The comma is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text....
 or 'right half ring above' U+055A ( ? ).

The ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the dot above or comma above
Comma (punctuation)

The comma is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text....
 diacritic marks, with the combing o above (U+0366 ), or with the degree sign °. Additionally this symbol Å is the proper ångström
Ångström

An ?ngstr?m or angstrom is an internationally recognized non-SI unit of length equal to 0.1 nanometre or 1 metres. It is sometimes used in expressing the sizes of atoms, lengths of chemical bonds and optical spectrum, and dimensions of parts of integrated circuits....
 sign.

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