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The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) requires specific names for the symbols and diacritics used in the alphabet. It is often desirable to distinguish an IPA symbol from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound in broad transcription.
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 ...
K. R. Norman writes that "diacriticals are a matter of spelling, not of aesthetics, or of whim, and result from an attempt to make the Roman alphabet cope with a sound pattern that needs an alphabet with more than 26 letters. Omitting diacritics is therefore a matter of misspelling and inserting them is a matter of correct spelling.
Also, if for a noun the major dictionaries (Webster's; OED;...) concur that it is always written with a diacritic, the Wikipedia content page is always at the version with diacritic (e.g. "cliché"). In more ambiguous cases, a standard letter (a-z/A-Z) with a diacritic is acceptable in an article title if all of the following conditions are met:
Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters.It also contains the character "Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actually separates characters that would otherwise be considered a single grapheme in a given context.
For example, the English velar consonant /k/ is fronted before the vowel /iː/ (as in keep) compared to articulation of /k/ before other vowels (as in cool). This fronting is called palatalization . The relative position of a sound may be described as advanced ( fronted ), retracted ( backed ), raised , lowered , centralized , or mid-centralized .
IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs and non-IPA phonetic letters.
Compound diacritics are possible, for example U+01DA ǚ LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS AND CARON, used as a tonal marks for Hanyu Pinyin, which uses both a two dots diacritic with a caron diacritic. Conversely, when the letter to be accented is an i , the diacritic replaces the tittle, thus: ï .