Macron
From Freepedia
| Diacritical marks |
|---|
|
accent
breve ( ˘ )
hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) |
| Marks sometimes used as diacritics |
|
apostrophe ( ’ ) |
A macron (from Gr. μακρός makros "large") is a diacritic ¯ placed over a vowel originally to indicate that the vowel is long. The opposite is a breve ˘, used to indicate a short vowel. These distinctions are usually phonemic.
| Upper Case | Lower Case | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Character | HTML Code | Character | HTML Code |
| Ā | Ā | ā | ā |
| Ē | Ē | ē | ē |
| Ī | Ī | ī | ī |
| Ō | Ō | ō | ō |
| Ū | Ū | ū | ū |
| Ǖ | Ǖ | ǖ | ǖ |
| Ȳ | Ȳ | ȳ | ȳ |
In modern Old English transliterations, the macron has been used in this way.
In Latvian, A-macron, E-macron, I-macron and U-macron are considered separate letters that sort in alphabetical order immediately after A, E, I, U respectively. For instance, baznīca comes before bārda in a Latvian dictionary.
In pinyin, macrons are used over a, e, i, o, u, ü (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ǖ) to indicate the first tone of Mandarin Chinese. It does not indicate vowel length in any way.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, macron over a vowel indicates a mid-level tone, and not length.
In Hawaiian (where it is known as the kahakō) it is again used to indicate long vowels, which in turn influence the placement of accent stress in words.
Early writing in Māori did not distinguish vowel length. Some have advocated that the double vowel orthography be used to distinguish vowel length. However, the Māori Language Commission (Te Taura Whiri) advocate a macron be used to designate a long vowel. The use of the macron is now wide-spread in modern Māori writings, though many people use a diaeresis mark instead (e.g. Mäori instead of Māori) due to lack of support on computers.
It is also used in many dictionaries and textbooks to mark vowel length in languages that do not feature this diacritic in everyday use; for example it is used in the Hepburn transcription of Japanese to indicate a long vowel, as in kōtsū (交通) "traffic" as opposed to kotsu (骨) "bone" or "knack (fig.)". The indigenous Japanese kana transcription of 交通, however, is こうつう, which character for character transliterates as koutsuu. Although not standard, this latter system is arguably the most commonly seen on the Internet, next to not marking vowel length at all.
The macron is often used in modern Latin dictionaries to mark vowel length, in conjunction with the breve.
In German handwriting, a macron is used to distinguish u from n.
In Russian handwriting, a macron is used over a lowercase т to distinguish it from Ш. A handwritten lowercase Russian т looks like an English lowercase m with a macron.
In Unicode, "combining macron" is one of the combining diacritical marks, its code is U+0304 (in HTML, ̄ or ̄). There are also several precomposed characters; their HTML/Unicode numbers are as in the table to the right. In LaTeX a macron is created with the command "\=" for example: M\=aori.
If the last two rows of the table do not display properly, the row before the last is the letter Uu with diaeresis (Ü ü) and macron, used in pinyin. The final row is the letter Yy with macron, used sometimes in teaching Latin.
