Circumflex

A circumflex (Latin circumflex, as much as " bent ", derived from Greek περισπωμένη ), also called French circonflexe, is a diacritical mark, usually for marking a special emphasis on pronunciation or a letter. It is a downwardly open acute angle (roof) above the letter (eg A, ​​C, ê ), the graphical counterpart of the caron ( č, for example ).

Occurrence

In Greek, the circumflex, which is to say Perispomene or Modern Greek Perispomeni there was already introduced in the 3rd century BC and written mostly as a round roof or like a Spanish tilde ( ~ ). He was referring to the ancient Greeks themselves on vowel length and stress, the Ancient Greek was thus a tonal language; he sounded any case, unlike the acute, the exact sound of the circumflex is however not known. In the two usual today Pronunciation forms of ancient Greek - Modern Greek pronunciation and the Western school debate, both no more tonal languages ​​- he sounds just as acute. In modern Greek, he was therefore replaced in 1982 with the other two accents by the acute similar Tonos ' ( accent unit ) because it caused students only unnecessary learning curve. Some conservative or elderly people in Greece use it but still.

In Old High German, the circumflex was used in part to stretch the i ( phonetic value: ie). In the modern spelling of the normalized Middle High German shows the circumflex over a, e, i, o, and u is a long debate on. All vowels are pronounced without circumflex short.

In the French language the circumflex ( accent circonflexe ) marks over vowels in most cases, the failure of a subsequent old French "s", see O. Fr. estre, Fenestre, Chasteau - Modern-French. être ( "to be" ), fenêtre ( " window " ), château ( " Castle "). In the English language is this " s" sometimes still present: Modern-French. Hôpital ( "Hospital" ), Ile ("Island " ), hôtel ( "Hotel" ) - English: hospital, Iceland, hostel ( " Hostel "). In some specific cases the French circumflex to denote a vowel elongation is used without the " s" failure, such as at théâtre "theater" of Latin theatrum. Third, the French circumflex is used to distinguish homophonic ( same -sounding ) words in Scripture, such as sûr "safe" and sur "on ".

In Italian, the circumflex was especially in the past with auslautendem - io used for plural formation of words, to highlight the " missing " plural -i: il principio → i Principi.

In Chichewa called W, W (W, w with circumflex ) the bilabial fricative / β /, such as the country name Malaŵi (German: Malawi).

In Esperanto, the circumflex over the consonants c, g, h, j and s appear ( Æ C, G, G, H, H, J, J, S ŝ ). The pronunciation (same order): voiceless, ch ' (Czech Republic), voiced, dsh ' (jungle ), Ah - sound ' ( thing), voiced, beautiful ' (Journal ), unvoiced, sch ' (snake ).

In Slovak, the Ô, ô (O, o with circumflex ) occurs, which the letter O in a diphthong / uo / converts.

In the latest ISO transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet, the circumflex is used to assign those Cyrillic letters that have been transliterated in a combination of several Latin letters a single Latin letter. The choice of sign corresponds to any convention, but it always makes a unique back translation into Cyrillic:

Use

In formulas, the circumflex accent is read as an umbrella or hat. He has among others the following meanings:

• In mathematics, the Fourier transform of a function is referred to by
• In addition, a maximum value is often characterized as. x is the largest of a series or set.
• And the constant function is referred to as the mapping which assigns to each constant.
• In physics as sizes can be made as a ( quantum ) operators identified: for example, the Hamiltonian or energy operator:
• One connects by means of the circumflex operator resembling two statements to a conjunction. However, this is not an actual circumflex and will not read ( rather than " and").
• In Historical Linguistics of the circumflex is used to denote vowel length.

As an independent character of the circumflex is used in some programming languages ​​and in TeX to denote powers. In the calculation of powers, eg with a spreadsheet program or with a calculator to write instead of x ² then x ^ 2 In the programming language C and derived languages ​​such as C and Java, however, the caret means no potentiation, but stands for the bitwise XOR operation. Furthermore, he finds in the computer in regular expressions use to qualify for applied to strings pattern the beginning of the line or exclude certain characters by negation.

On the Internet, two circumflexes (^ ^) are often called " gg" as a synonym for or "haha " is used to express joy or amusement at the previous statement. The two symbols to represent twinkling eyes before giggling. It is found in chat groups, forums, MMORPGs and the like (see network jargon ).

The non-printing control characters are sometimes visualized by the so-called " caret notation ". This provides the control characters with a circumflex (English " caret " ) followed by another ASCII character dar. The control character code is then obtained from the code of the (large) letter minus 64 (hex 40). For example, a line feed character (Line Feed ), code 10 (hex 0A ) is shown as ^ J, because J has the code 74 (hex 4A). Many text consoles / terminals can be switched so that they will not perform control character, but this show caret notation. Often this change happens unintentionally, as by faulty programs that send the wrong switching commands to the console. Thus it may happen that the control characters such as backspace (^ H) or Return ( ^ M) represented by the caret notation be inserted inadvertently when the corresponding button is pressed. This fact is sometimes used in chats, e -mails and web forums to do so, as if you have deleted a text again, the " mistake " but still can be seen. This serves as a stylistic means to conceal about in this way an insult anything or represent self-censorship ironically: " This idiot ^ H ^ H ^ H ^ H ^ HTyp said ...".

Display on the computer

Fonts

The ASCII character set contains only the ^ character ( Unicode U 005 E at position ), which is now interpreted as a single -standing, universal character. The 8- bit character sets of ISO 8859 family include selected characters with circumflex; ISO 8859-1, for example, contains  â, Ê, ê, Î, î Ô ô Û û as well as, ISO 8859-3, the circumflex character of Esperanto.

In the Unicode Standard ( 005 E U) the typographically better characters (U 02 C6 ), and other finished composite characters with circumflex are in addition to the universal character ^ contain (among ŝ ). By adjusting a combining circumflex accent (U 0302 ), any additional characters are displayed with circumflex.

LaTeX and TeX can represent any character with circumflex. There are to two different commands:

• \ Produced in math mode for the set of formulas {a } has the formula.
• In text mode for typesetting \ ^ a produces a â.