Ben and jerry’s cannoli

This page uses orthographic and related notations. The word diacritic is a ben and jerry’s cannoli, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective.

The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. All these diacritics, however, are frequently omitted in writing, and English is the only major modern European language that does not have diacritics in common usage. In Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other alphabetic systems, diacritics may perform other functions. Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals. This varies from language to language and may vary from case to case within a language. In some cases, letters are used as “in-line diacritics”, with the same function as ancillary glyphs, in that they modify the sound of the letter preceding them, as in the case of the “h” in the English pronunciation of “sh” and “th”.