Inverted breve

Inverted breve or arch is a diacritical mark, shaped like the top half of a circle ( ̑ ), that is, like an upside-down breve (˘). It looks similar to the circumflex (ˆ), which has a sharp tip (Â â Ê ê Î î Ô ô Û û), while the inverted breve is rounded: (Ȃ ȃ Ȇ ȇ Ȋ ȋ Ȏ ȏ Ȗ ȗ).

◌̑
Inverted breve
U+0311 ◌̑ COMBINING INVERTED BREVE

Inverted breve can occur above or below the letter. It is not used in any natural language alphabet,^{[citation needed]} but as a phonetic indicator. It is identical in form to the Ancient Greek circumflex.

Uses

Serbo-Croatian

The inverted breve above is used in traditional Slavicist notation of Serbo-Croatian phonology to indicate long falling accent. It is placed above the syllable nucleus, which can be one of five vowels (ȃ ȇ ȋ ȏ ȗ) or syllabic ȓ. This use of the inverted breve is derived from the Ancient Greek circumflex, which was preserved in the polytonic orthography of Modern Greek and influenced^{[clarification needed]} early Serbian Cyrillic printing through religious literature. In the early 19th century, it began to be used in both Latin and Cyrillic as a diacritic to mark prosody in the systematic study of the Serbo-Croatian linguistic continuum.

International Phonetic Alphabet

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, an inverted breve below is used to mark a vowel as non-syllabic, i.e. assuming the role of a semivowel. The diacritic thus expands upon the four primary symbols [j, w, ɥ, ɰ] the IPA reserves for semivowels, which correspond to the full vowels [i, u, y, ɯ], respectively. Any vowel is eligible for marking as non-syllabic; a frequent use of the diacritic is in conjunction with the centralised equivalents of the vowels just mentioned: [ɪ̯, ʊ̯, ʏ̯].

The same diacritic is placed under iota (ι̯) to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *y as it relates to Greek grammar; upsilon with an inverted breve (υ̯) is used alongside digamma (ϝ) to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel *w.^[1]

Encoding

Inverted breve characters are supported in Unicode and HTML code (decimal numeric character reference).

Name	Letter	Unicode	HTML
Combining Inverted Breve	◌̑	U+0311	̑
Combining Inverted Breve Below	◌̯	U+032F	̯
Combining Double Inverted Breve	◌͡◌	U+0361	͡
Combining Double Inverted Breve Below	◌᷼◌	U+1DFC	᷼
Modifier Breve With Inverted Breve	꭛	U+AB5B	꭛
Latin Capital Letter A With Inverted Breve	Ȃ	U+0202	Ȃ
Latin Small Letter A With Inverted Breve	ȃ	U+0203	ȃ
Latin Capital Letter E With Inverted Breve	Ȇ	U+0206	Ȇ
Latin Small Letter E With Inverted Breve	ȇ	U+0207	ȇ
Latin Capital Letter I With Inverted Breve	Ȋ	U+020A	Ȋ
Latin Small Letter I With Inverted Breve	ȋ	U+020B	ȋ
Latin Capital Letter O With Inverted Breve	Ȏ	U+020E	Ȏ
Latin Small Letter O With Inverted Breve	ȏ	U+020F	ȏ
Latin Capital Letter R With Inverted Breve	Ȓ	U+0212	Ȓ
Latin Small Letter R With Inverted Breve	ȓ	U+0213	ȓ
Latin Capital Letter U With Inverted Breve	Ȗ	U+0216	Ȗ
Latin Small Letter U With Inverted Breve	ȗ	U+0217	ȗ

In LaTeX the control \textroundcap{o} with \usepackage{tipa} puts an inverted breve over the letter o.^[2]

See also

• Tie (typography)