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Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
For example, French and Portuguese treat letters with diacritical marks the same as the underlying letter for purposes of ordering and dictionaries. The Scandinavian languages and the Finnish language, by contrast, treat the characters with diacritics å , ä , and ö as distinct letters of the alphabet, and sort them after z .
The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Romance languages: Catalan uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and o). French orthography uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and u).
A macron (/ ˈ m æ k r ɒ n, ˈ m eɪ-/ MAK-ron, MAY-) is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν (makrón) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics. It now more often marks a long vowel.
"Place-names from foreign languages appear in roman; retain diacritical marks if original is from a Latin alphabet except in commonly anglicized names: Montreal, Quebec, Istanbul. If a place-name is transliterated from a non-Latin alphabet, diacritical marks are generally not used except on atlas and supplement maps.
Phonemic notation commonly uses IPA symbols that are rather close to the default pronunciation of a phoneme, but for legibility often uses simple and 'familiar' letters rather than precise notation, for example /r/ and /o/ for the English [ɹʷ] and [əʊ̯] sounds, or /c, ɟ/ for [t͜ʃ, d͜ʒ] as mentioned above.
Diacritical marks of two dots ¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut , though there are numerous others.
The diaeresis is also used in French when a silent e is added to the sequence gu, to show that it is to be pronounced [ɡy] rather than as a digraph for [ɡ]. For example, when the feminine ‑e is added to aigu [eɡy] "sharp", the pronunciation does not change in most accents: [d] aiguë [eɡy] as opposed to the city name Aigues-Mortes [ɛɡ ...