Palatal hook

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N with palatal hook, followed by eng, a palatal nasal and a retroflex n for comparison, in the Doulos SIL font.

The palatal hook ( ̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc.

The IPA recommended that esh (ʃ) and ezh (ʒ) not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ʆ and ʓ. However, versions with the hook may have been used by some authors.

The palatal hook was withdrawn in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ƫ becomes tʲ).

[edit] Computer encoding

Unicode includes both a combining character for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including superscript letters with palatal hooks.

While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest weren't added until 2005. As such, font support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.

[edit] References

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