Inverted breve


Inverted breve or arch is a diacritical mark, shaped like the top half of a circle, that is, like an upside-down breve. It looks similar to the circumflex, but the circumflex has a sharp tip; the inverted breve is rounded: compare Ȃ ȃ Ȇ ȇ Ȋ ȋ Ȏ ȏ Ȗ ȗ versus  â Ê ê Î î Ô ô Û û.
Inverted breve can occur above or below the letter. It is not used in any natural language alphabet, but only as a phonetic indicator though it is identical in form to the Ancient Greek circumflex.

Uses

Serbo-Croatian

The inverted breve above is used in traditional Slavicist notation of Serbo-Croatian phonology to indicate long falling accent. It is placed above the syllable nucleus, which can be one of five vowels or syllabic ȓ.
This use of the inverted breve is derived from the Ancient Greek circumflex, which was preserved in the polytonic orthography of Modern Greek and influenced early Serbian Cyrillic printing through religious literature. In the early 19th century, it began to be used in both Latin and Cyrillic as a diacritic to mark prosody in the systematic study of the Serbian-Croatian linguistic continuum.

International Phonetic Alphabet

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, inverted breve below is used to denote that the vowel is not syllabic. Thus, semivowels are transcribed either using dedicated symbols or by adding the diacritic to a vowel sound, enabling more possible semivowels.
The same diacritic is placed under iota to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel as it relates to Greek grammar; upsilon with an inverted breve is used alongside digamma to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel .

Encoding

Inverted breve characters are supported in Unicode and HTML code.
NameLetterUnicodeHTML
Combining Inverted Breve◌̑U+0311̑
Combining Inverted Breve Below◌̯U+032F̯
Combining Double Inverted Breve◌͡◌U+0361͡
Combining Double Inverted Breve Below◌᷼◌U+1DFC᷼
Modifier Breve With Inverted Breve꭛U+AB5B꭛
Latin Capital Letter A With Inverted BreveȂU+0202Ȃ
Latin Small Letter A With Inverted BreveȃU+0203ȃ
Latin Capital Letter E With Inverted BreveȆU+0206Ȇ
Latin Small Letter E With Inverted BreveȇU+0207ȇ
Latin Capital Letter I With Inverted BreveȊU+020AȊ
Latin Small Letter I With Inverted BreveȋU+020Bȋ
Latin Capital Letter O With Inverted BreveȎU+020EȎ
Latin Small Letter O With Inverted BreveȏU+020Fȏ
Latin Capital Letter R With Inverted BreveȒU+0212Ȓ
Latin Small Letter R With Inverted BreveȓU+0213ȓ
Latin Capital Letter U With Inverted BreveȖU+0216Ȗ
Latin Small Letter U With Inverted BreveȗU+0217ȗ

In LaTeX the control \textroundcap puts an inverted breve over the letter o.