Names
Usage differs as to the name of this diacritic. In typography, the term "caron" seems to be more popular. In linguistics, the tendency is to use haček (with no long mark), largely due to the influence of the Prague School (particularly on Structuralist linguists who subsequently developed alphabets for previously unwritten languages of the Americas). Pullum's and Ladusaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide (Chicago, 1996) uses the term wedge.
The term caron is used in the official names of Unicode characters (e.g., "Latin capital letter Z with caron"). Its earliest known use was in the United States Government Printing Office Style Manual of 1967, and it was later used in character sets such as DIN 31624 (1979), ISO 5426 (1980), ISO/IEC 6937 (1983) and ISO/IEC 8859-2 (1985). Its actual origin remains obscure, but some have suggested that it may derive from a fusion of caret and macron. Though this may be folk etymology, it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions.
The name haček (with no long mark) appears in most English dictionaries; the Oxford English Dictionary gives its earliest citation as 1953. In Czech, háček means "small hook", the diminutive form of hák. The Czech plural form is háčky.
In Slovak it is called mäkčeň (i.e. "softener" or "palatalization mark"), in Slovenian strešica ("little roof") or kljukica ("little hook"), in Croatian and Serbian kvaka or kvačica ("angled hook" or "small angled hook"), in Lithuanian paukščiukas ("little bird"), katus ("roof") in Estonian, hattu ("hat") in Finnish, and ičášleče ("wedge") in Lakota (a Native American language).
Read more about this topic: Caron
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