Macron

A macron (from Gr. ?????? makros "large")

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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.

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In modern Old English transliterations, the macron has been used in this way.

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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, bazn?ca comes before b?rda in a Latvian dictionary.

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In pinyin, macrons are used over a, e, i, o, u, ? (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?) to indicate the first tone of Mandarin Chinese. It does not indicate vowel length in any way.

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In the International Phonetic Alphabet, macron over a vowel indicates a mid-level tone, and not length.

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In Hawaiian (where it is known as the kahak?) it is again used to indicate long vowels, which in turn influence the placement of accent stress in words.

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Early writing in M?ori did not distinguish vowel length. Some have advocated that the double vowel orthography be used to distinguish vowel length. However, the M?ori 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 M?ori writings, though many people use a diaeresis mark instead (e.g. M?ori instead of M?ori) due to lack of support on computers.

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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 k?ts? (??) "traffic" as opposed to kotsu (?) "bone" or "knack (fig.)". The indigenous Japanese kana transcription of ??, however, is ????, 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.

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The macron is often used in modern Latin dictionaries to mark vowel length, in conjunction with the breve.

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In German handwriting, a macron is used to distinguish u from n.

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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.

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If the last two rows of the table do not display properly, the row before the last is the letter Uu with diaeresis (? ?) and macron, used in pinyin. The final row is the letter Yy with macron, used sometimes in teaching Latin.

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Diacritic: A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a word's pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The word derives from the Greek word ??????????? (distinguishing). Note that diacritic is a noun and diacritical is the corresponding...

Vowel: In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract where there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tr...

Long: The word long has several meanings:...