The ogonek ([„-g-n“k], Polish for "little tail", the diminutive of ogon) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.

History

The e caudata (-), a symbol similar to an e with ogonek, evolved from a ligature of a and e in medieval scripts, in Latin and Irish palaeography.

Use

• Polish (letters “, “)
• Kashubian (“)
• scholarly transcriptions of Old Church Slavonic and Proto-Slavic (-, -)

• Lithuanian (-, -, -, -)

• Creek, Navajo and Western Apache (-, --, -, --, -, --, -, --)
• Chiricahua and Mescalero (-, --, -, --, -, --, -, --),
• Tutchone (-, -, -, -, y-)
• Gwich'in

• Elfdalian (-, -, -, -, y- and --)
• Modern scholarly transcriptions of Old Norse (letter -)

Example in Polish:

Wó- go pyta: -Panie chrz-szczu,

Po co pan tak brz-czy w g„szczu-“

- Jan Brzechwa, Chrz-szcz

Example in Lithuanian:

Lyd-dami g„stan-i“ „ar“ v-lai

Pakilo - dang- margi sakalai

- Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Margi sakalai

Example in Elfdalian:

"Ja, eð war -e plåg að g-slkallum, dar eð war slaik uondlostjyner i g-slun."

- Vikar Margit Andersdotter, I fäbodlivet i gamla tider.

Values

Nasalization

The use of the ogonek to indicate nasality is common in the transcription of the indigenous languages of the Americas. This usage originated in the orthographies created by Christian missionaries to transcribe these languages. Later, the practice was continued by Americanist anthropologists and linguists who still follow this convention in phonetic transcription to the present day (see Americanist phonetic notation).

The ogonek is also used in academic transliteration of Old Church Slavonic and Old Norse. In Polish, Old Church Slavonic, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua, and Dalecarlian it indicates that the vowel is nasalized. Even if - is nasalized e in Polish, - is nasalized o not a (this is so because of the vowel change - "-" was a long nasal "a", which turned into short nasal "o", when the vowel quantity distinction has disappeared).

Length

In Lithuanian, where it formerly indicated nasalization which is no longer distinctive, it indicates that a vowel is long. The Lithuanian word for "ogonek" is nosin- which literally means "nasal".

Tone

In Navajo, Chiricahua, Western Apache, and Mescalero it can be combined with the acute and grave accents where it indicates high tone, or in long vowels high, falling, rising tone (e.g. --, -, ). In the orthography conventions of Willem de Reuse, Western Apache has combinations of ogonek and macron (e.g. -, -).

Typographical notes

The ogonek should be almost the same size as a descender (in larger type sizes may be relatively quite shorter) and should not be confused with the cedilla or comma diacritic marks used in other languages.

The HTML/Unicode numbers for ogonek letters are

Unicode also provides the ogonek as a combining diacritic mark, at the codepoint #x0328;.

Other encodings

E with ogonek is present in both Latin-2 and Latin-4, as CA (uppercase) and EA (lowercase). In Latin-10 it is located at DD (uppercase) and FD (lowercase).

LaTeX2e

In LaTeX2e macro \k will typeset a letter with ogonek, if it is supported by the font encoding , e.g. \k{a} will typeset -. (The default LaTeX OT1 encoding does not support it, but the newer T1 one does. It may be enabled by saying \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} in the preamble.) The package TIPA activated by using the command "\usepackage{tipa}", offers a different way: "\textpolhook{a}" will produce -.

See also

• E caudata
• Cedilla
• Comma (punctuation)

References

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

External links

• Diacritics Project - All you need to design a font with correct accents
• Polish Diacritics - How To-
• Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska (March, 2005)