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Double acute accent
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<h2 id="uses">Uses</h2> <h3>Vowel length</h3> <h4>History</h4> <p>Length marks first appeared in <a href="/facts/Hungarian_alphabet/oItxF0Ug">Hungarian orthography</a> in the 15th-century <a href="/facts/Hussite_Bible/DVV0e3uQ">Hussite Bible</a>. Initially, only <i>á</i> and <i>é</i> were marked, since they are different in <a href="/facts/Vowel/BNhCeFtH">quality</a> as well as <a href="/facts/Vowel_length/BhBqJJu3">length</a>. Later <i>í</i>, <i>ó</i>, <i>ú</i> were marked as well. </p><p>In the 18th century, before Hungarian orthography became fixed, <i>u</i> and <i>o</i> with <a href="/facts/Umlaut_(diacritic)/FsYeoSzC">umlaut</a> + <a href="/facts/Acute_accent/XDHwqnvk">acute</a> (ǘ, ö́) were used in some printed documents.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2" href="#fn:2"><sup>2</sup></a> 19th century typographers introduced the double acute as a more aesthetic solution. </p> <h4>Hungarian</h4> <p>In Hungarian, the double acute is thought of as the letter having both an umlaut and an acute accent. <a href="/facts/Hungarian_language/nt4g0ano">Standard Hungarian</a> has 14 vowels in a symmetrical system: seven short vowels <i>(<a href="/facts/A/2R3BU1nc">a</a>, <a href="/facts/E/0G2cAFzu">e</a>, <a href="/facts/I/2w7mqI7e">i</a>, <a href="/facts/O/41AF4mKp">o</a>, <a href="/facts/%C3%96/41AF4mKp">ö</a>, <a href="/facts/U/41AF4mKp">u</a>, <a href="/facts/%C3%9C/41AF4mKp">ü</a>)</i> and seven long ones, which are written with an <a href="/facts/Acute_accent/XDHwqnvk">acute accent</a> in the case of <i>á, é, í, ó, ú</i>, and with the double acute in the case of <i>ő, ű</i>. Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it distinguishes different words and grammatical forms. </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>short</th><td>a</td><td>e</td><td>i</td><td>o</td><td>ö</td><td>u</td><td>ü</td></tr><tr><th>long</th><td>á</td><td>é</td><td>í</td><td>ó</td><td>ő</td><td>ú</td><td>ű</td></tr></tbody></table> <h4>Slovak</h4> <p>At the beginning of the 20th century, the letter <i>A̋</i> (<i>A</i> with double acute) was used in <a href="/facts/Slovak_language/HmmobnJ8">Slovak</a> as a long variant of the short vowel <i>Ä</i> (<i>A</i> with diaeresis), representing the vowel /æː/ in dialect and some <a href="/facts/Loanword/PWGYczgY">loanwords</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3" href="#fn:3"><sup>3</sup></a> The letter is still used for this purpose in Slovak phonetic transcription systems. </p> <h3>Umlaut</h3> <h4>Handwriting</h4> <p>In <a href="/facts/Handwriting/S9W0DHlo">handwriting</a> in <a href="/facts/German_alphabet/wRfTdcfG">German</a> and <a href="/facts/Swedish_alphabet/9vQCp9EF">Swedish</a>, the <a href="/facts/Umlaut_(diacritic)/FsYeoSzC">umlaut</a> is sometimes written similarly to a double acute. In the Swedish alphabet, <i>Å</i>, <i>Ä</i> and <i>Ö</i> are letters in their own right. </p> <h4>Chuvash</h4> <p>The <a href="/facts/Chuvash_language/2pvVW2sT">Chuvash language</a> written in the <a href="/facts/Cyrillic_script/0btN3oWC">Cyrillic script</a> uses a double-acute <a href="/facts/U_with_double_acute_(Cyrillic)/0nUALMBy">Ӳ, ӳ</a> /y/ as a <a href="/facts/Front_vowel/htKQs3AT">front</a> counterpart of <a href="/facts/U_(Cyrillic)/N3QqTzgV">Cyrillic letter У, у</a> /u/ (see <a href="/facts/Chuvash_language/2pvVW2sT">Chuvash vowel harmony</a>), likely after the analogy of handwriting in Latin script languages.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4" href="#fn:4"><sup>4</sup></a> In other minority languages of <a href="/facts/Russia/jfkCwyxn">Russia</a> (<a href="/facts/Khakas_language/YPVUV3cc">Khakas</a>, <a href="/facts/Mari_language/Md4FcAXn">Mari</a>, <a href="/facts/Altay_language/6RjzhBDF">Altai</a>, and <a href="/facts/Khanty_language/drDgfCI2">Khanty</a>), the umlauted form <i><a href="/facts/U_with_diaeresis_(Cyrillic)/GEUILlRU">Ӱ</a></i> is used instead. </p> <h3>Faroese</h3> <p>Classical <a href="/facts/Danish_language/sTcGXTMJ">Danish</a> handwriting uses "ó" for "ø", which becomes a problem when writing <a href="/facts/Faroese_language/1nf145FG">Faroese</a> in the same tradition, as "ó" is a part of the Faroese alphabet. Thus <i>ő</i> is sometimes used for <i>ø</i> in Faroese. </p> <h3>Tone</h3> <h4>International Phonetic Alphabet</h4> <p>The <a href="/facts/International_Phonetic_Alphabet/2e7jmUaG">IPA</a> and many other <a href="/facts/Phonetic_transcription/bfbFHWur">phonetic alphabets</a> use two systems to indicate tone: a diacritic system and an adscript system. In the diacritic system, the double acute represents an extra high tone. </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>tone</th><th>diacritic</th><th>adscript</th></tr><tr><th>extra high</th><td>e̋</td><td>e˥</td></tr><tr><th>high</th><td>é</td><td>e˦</td></tr><tr><th>mid</th><td>ē</td><td>e˧</td></tr><tr><th>low</th><td>è</td><td>e˨</td></tr><tr><th>extra low</th><td>ȅ</td><td>e˩</td></tr></tbody></table> <p>One may encounter this use as a tone sign in some IPA-derived orthographies of minority languages, such as in the North American Native <a href="/facts/Tanacross_language/vwFn5Dsd">Tanacross</a> (Athapascan). In line with the IPA usage it denotes the extra-high tone. </p> <h2 id="unicode">Unicode </h2> <p><a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">Unicode</a> encodes a number of cases of "letter with double acute" as <a href="/facts/Precomposed_character/LhKrFQ4Y">precomposed characters</a> and these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using the <a href="/facts/Combining_character/nH8SFbIL">combining character</a> facility (U+030B ◌̋ <a href="/facts/Combining_character/nH8SFbIL">COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT</a>) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real-world application and thus are not shown in the table. </p> <ul><li>Double acute ◌̋ Latin: A̋ a̋</li><li>Ő ő</li><li>Ű ű Cyrillic: <a href="/facts/%D3%B2/0nUALMBy">Ӳ ӳ</a></li></ul> <h2 id="technical-notes">Technical notes</h2> <p>O and U with double acute accents are supported in the Code page 852, <a href="/facts/ISO_8859-2/rIjCMEr3">ISO 8859-2</a>, and <a href="/facts/Unicode/DDu3MfPV">Unicode</a> character sets. </p> <h3>Code page 852</h3> <p>Some of the <a href="/facts/Box-drawing_character/jKI4QHeG">box-drawing characters</a> of the original DOS <a href="/facts/Code_page_437/jx27vCbb">code page 437</a> were sacrificed in order to put in more accented letters (all printable characters from ISO 8859-2 are included). </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>Code point</th><td>0x8A</td><td>0x8B</td><td>0xEB</td><td>0xFB</td></tr><tr><th>Code page 852</th><td>Ő</td><td>ő</td><td>Ű</td><td>ű</td></tr></tbody></table> <h3>ISO 8859-2</h3> <p>In ISO 8859-2, the characters Ő, ő, Ű, and ű take the place of some similar-looking (but distinct, especially at bigger font sizes) letters of ISO 8859-1. </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>Code point</th><td>0xD5</td><td>0xF5</td><td>0xDB</td><td>0xFB</td></tr><tr><th>ISO 8859-1</th><td>Õ</td><td>õ</td><td>Û</td><td>û</td></tr><tr><th>ISO 8859-2</th><td>Ő</td><td>ő</td><td>Ű</td><td>ű</td></tr></tbody></table> <h3>Unicode</h3> <p>All occurrences of "double acute" in character names in the Unicode 9.0 standard: </p> <table><tbody><tr><th>description</th><th>character</th><th>Unicode</th><th>HTML</th></tr><tr><th colspan="4">Latin</th></tr><tr><td>LETTER OWITH DOUBLE ACUTE</td><td>Őő</td><td>U+0150U+0151</td><td>Őő</td></tr><tr><td>LETTER UWITH DOUBLE ACUTE</td><td>Űű</td><td>U+0170U+0171</td><td>Űű</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4">Accents</th></tr><tr><td><a href="/facts/Combining_character/nH8SFbIL">COMBINING</a>DOUBLE ACUTEACCENT</td><td>◌̋</td><td>U+030B</td><td>̋</td></tr><tr><td>DOUBLE ACUTEACCENT</td><td>˝</td><td>U+02DD</td><td>˝</td></tr><tr><td><a href="/facts/Phonetic_symbols_in_Unicode/hK8F3ggJ">MODIFIER LETTER</a>MIDDLEDOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT</td><td>˶</td><td>U+02F6</td><td>˶</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4"><a href="/facts/Cyrillic_script/0btN3oWC">Cyrillic</a></th></tr><tr><td>LETTER <a href="/facts/U_with_double_acute_(Cyrillic)/0nUALMBy">UWITH DOUBLE ACUTE</a></td><td>Ӳӳ</td><td>U+04F2U+04F3</td><td>Ӳӳ</td></tr><tr><th colspan="4"><a href="/facts/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics/YylyRMzU">Canadian syllabics</a></th></tr><tr><td>FINALDOUBLE ACUTE</td><td>ᐥ</td><td>U+1425</td><td>ᐥ</td></tr></tbody></table> <h3>LaTeX Input</h3> <p>In <a href="/facts/LaTeX/c1lvjF0A">LaTeX</a>, the double acute accent is typeset with the \H{} (<a href="/facts/Mnemonic/6HfDn0ks">mnemonic</a> for "Hungarian") command. For example, the name <a href="/facts/Paul_Erd%C5%91s/63LoUTe1">Paul Erdős</a> (in his native Hungarian: Erdős Pál) would be typeset as </p> Erd\H{o}s P\'al. <h3>X11 Input</h3> <p>In modern <a href="/facts/X11/ac2vRIQL">X11</a> systems (or utilities such as WinCompose on Windows systems), the double acute can be typed by pressing the <a href="/facts/Compose_key/RGMQ4P6A">Compose key</a> followed by = (the equal sign) and desired letter (o or u). </p> <h2 id="see-also">See also</h2> <ul><li><a href="/facts/Acute_accent/XDHwqnvk">Acute accent</a></li> <li><a href="/facts/Double_grave_accent/lVq5p1k7">Double grave accent</a></li> <li><a href="/facts/Umlaut_(diacritic)/FsYeoSzC">Umlaut/Diaeresis</a></li> <li><a href="/facts/Hungarian_alphabet/oItxF0Ug">Hungarian alphabet</a></li></ul> <h2 id="footnotes">Footnotes</h2> <h2 id="external-links">External links</h2> Look up <i>ő</i> or <i>ű</i> in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. <ul><li><a href="http://diacritics.typo.cz">Diacritics Project—All you need to design a font with correct accents</a> (contains some incorrect/sloppy data on history)</li></ul> <h2 id="references">References</h2> <ol> <li id="fn:1"><p>Ray Larabie (18 Aug 2010). "The Low Profile Acutes vs. Hungarumlaut". typophile.com. Archived from the original on 2015-05-01. Retrieved 2014-09-17. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150501213625/http://typophile.com/node/73344" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20150501213625/http://typophile.com/node/73344</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:2"><p>"Short, illustrated outline about the Hungarian double acutes". www.font.hu. Retrieved 2014-09-17. <a href="http://www.font.hu/hrant.html" target="_blank">http://www.font.hu/hrant.html</a> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:3"><p>Czambel, S. 1902. Rukoväť spisovnej reči slovenskej. Turčiansky Sv. Martin: Vydanie Knihkupecko-nakladateľshého spolku, p. 2. <a href="http://www.juls.savba.sk/ediela/rsrs1902/rsrs1902.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.juls.savba.sk/ediela/rsrs1902/rsrs1902.pdf</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:4"><p>A possible explanation of the diacritic being influenced by the German handwritten form is the early version of the Chuvash alphabet devised much more than 50 years before the other ones mentioned. <a href="/wiki/Chuvash_language#1873–1938" target="_blank">/wiki/Chuvash_language#1873–1938</a> <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> </ol>