The character Ů is a grapheme in the Czech language preserved for historic reasons, which identifies a vowel shift. For example, the word for "horse" used to be written kóň, which evolved, along with pronunciation, into kuoň. Ultimately, the vowel disappeared completely, and the uo evolved into ů, modern form kůň. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú, but changes to a short o when a word is morphed, thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Ů cannot occur in initial position. However, ú occurs almost exclusively in initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound. These characters are used also in Steuer's Silesian alphabet. The pronunciation has prevailed in some Moravian dialects, as well as in the Slovak language, which uses the letter ô instead of ů. The ring is used in some dialects of Emilian-Romagnol to distinguish the sound from . ů has been used in Old Lithuanian in Lithuania Minor from the 16th till the beginning of the 20th century and for a shorter time in 16th-century Lithuania Major for diphthong. The ring has been used in the Lithuanian Cyrillic alphabet promoted by Russian authorities in the last quarter of the 19th century with the letter У̊ / у̊ used to represent the diphthong. ẘ and ẙ are used in the ISO 233 romanization of the Arabic alphabet. A fatḥah followed by the letter ⟨ﻭ⟩ with a sukūn is romanized as aẘ. A fatḥah followed by the letter ⟨ﻱ⟩ with a sukūn over it is romanized as aẙ. Ring upon e is used by certain dialectologists of the Walloon language to note the vowel typically replacing and in the Brabant province central Walloon dialects. The difficulty of type-writing it has led some writers to prefer ë for the same sound. Many more characters can be created in Unicode using the combining character, including the above-mentioned у̊ or ń̊. The standalone symbol is. The unrelated, but nearly identical degree symbol is. Although similar in appearance, it is not to be confused with the Japanese handakuten, a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with. Unicode has:
Underring
encodes the underring at The underring is used in IPA to indicate voicelessness, and in Indo-European studies or in Sanskrit transliteration to indicate syllabicity of r, l, m, n etc.. R with ring below, L with ring below, R with ring below and macron, and L with ring below and macron were actually proposed for Unicode because of their use in Sanskrit transliteration and the CSX+ Indic character set. However, the proposal was rejected, because they are already encoded as sequences. In Pashto romanization, ḁ is used to represent /ə/. Examples:
Emilian-Romagnol
In Romagnol, e̥ is used to represent /ə/ in diphthongs, e.g. Santarcangelo dialect ame̥ig 'friend', ne̥ud 'naked'. In Emilian, e̥ can be used to represent unstressed /ə/ in very accurate transcriptions.
Half rings
Half rings also exist as diacritic marks, these are characters and. These caracters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, respectively for mediopalatal pronunciation and stron onset vowels. These characters may be used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, denoting less and more roundedness, as alternatives to half rings below and. They are here given with the lowercase a: a͑ and a͗, a̜ and a̹. is similar in appearance but differs from a͗ because its compatibility decomposition uses instead of. Other, similar signs are in use in Armenian: the and the. Breve and inverted breve are also shaped like half rings, respectively, the bottom and top half of a circle.
Other uses
The ring is used in the transliteration of the Abkhaz language to represent the letter ҩ. It may also be used in place of the abbreviation symbol ॰ when transliterating the Devanagari alphabet.
Similar marks
The ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the dot or diacritic marks, or with the degree sign °. The half ring as a diacritic mark should not be confused with the comma or ogonek diacritic marks.
