O͘
{{short description|Letter of the Latin alphabet}}
File:Latin letter O with dot above right.svg
O͘o͘ is one of the six Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) orthography. It is pronounced {{IPAblink|ɔ}}, like the pronunciation of {{angbr|aw}} in "law". Because Hokkien is a tonal language, the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first and fourth tone with the fourth and eighth tone always only used in syllables with a syllable stop (i.e. {{angle bracket|-p}}, {{angle bracket|-t}}, {{angle bracket|-k}}, {{angle bracket|-h}} {{IPA|/-ʔ/}}), and the other six to eight possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it:
- Ó͘ ó͘ (second tone) 《陰上／阴上》
- O͘{{void}}̀ o͘{{void}}̀ (third tone) 《陰去／阴去》
- O͘{{void}}̂ o͘{{void}}̂ (fifth tone) 《陽平／阳平》
- Ǒ͘ ǒ͘ (sixth tone, used in Quanzhou-descended dialects) 《陽上／阳上》
- O͘{{void}}̄ o͘{{void}}̄ (seventh tone) 《陽去／阳去》
- O̍͘ o̍͘ (eighth tone) 《陽入／阳入》
- Ŏ͘ ŏ͘ / Ő͘ ő͘ (ninth tone, high rising in Taiwanese Hokkien)
History
File:First Phonetic Reader by Elias Longley.png's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy used a barred o with curl very similar to the one on the far left of the 4th row of letters from the top of this image to represent the {{IPA|/ɔ/}} sound that Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) usually represented with O͘ o͘]]
The character was introduced by the Xiamen-based missionary Elihu Doty in the mid-nineteenth century, as a way to distinguish the Hokkien vowels {{IPA|/o/}} and {{IPA|/ɔ/}} (the former becoming {{angle bracket|o͘}}).{{cite web|url=http://203.64.42.21/giankiu/GTH/2002/TOLMJ/giteng/lunbun/K2-kloeter.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110529221109/http://203.64.42.21/giankiu/GTH/2002/TOLMJ/giteng/lunbun/K2-kloeter.pdf|url-status=dead|archive-date=2011-05-29|title=The History of Peh-oe-ji|last=Klöter|first=Henning}} Since then it has become established in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography, with only occasional deviations early in its usage – one example being Carstairs Douglas's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, where he replaced the {{angle bracket|o͘ }} with {{angle bracket|ө̛ }} (an o with a curl, similar to that of the English Phonotypic Alphabet),{{cite book|title=Chinese English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken of Amoy|last=Douglas|first=Carstairs|author-link=Carstairs Douglas|orig-year=1873|year=1990|location=Taipei|publisher=Southern Materials Center|isbn=957-9482-32-2|url=https://archive.org/details/chineseenglishdict00doug}} and a second example being Tan Siew Imm's 2016 dictionary of Penang Hokkien, where she replaced the {{angle bracket|o͘ }} with {{angle bracket|ɵ}}.{{cite book |last1=Tan |first1=Siew Imm |title=Penang Hokkien-English Dictionary |date=2016 |newspaper=Areca Books |url=https://arecabooks.com/product/penang-hokkien-english-dictionary/ |access-date=21 August 2019}}
Computing
In the Unicode computer encoding, it is a normal Latin o followed by {{unichar|0358|COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT|cwith=◌}}, and is not to be confused with the Vietnamese Ơ. This letter is not well-supported by fonts and is often typed as either o· (using the interpunct), o• (using the bullet), o' (using the apostrophe), oo (as used in Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien and Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese), or ou (as used in Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese).
References
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{{Latin script}}
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Category:Latin letters with diacritics
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