The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, or as a proofreading mark. It can be above or below, and reversed. Its forms are called tie, double breve, enotikon or papyrological hyphen, ligature tie, and undertie.
Uses
Greek
The enotikon, papyrological hyphen, or Greek hyphen was a low tie mark found in late Classical and Byzantinepapyri. In an era when Greek texts were typically written scripta continua, the enotikon served to show that a series of letters should be read as a single word rather than misunderstood as two separate words. Although modern Greek now uses the Latin hyphen, the Hellenic Organization for Standardization included mention of the enotikon in its romanization standard and Unicode is able to reproduce the symbol with its characters and. The enotikon was also used in Greek musical notation, as a slur under two notes. When a syllable was sung with three notes, this slur was used in combination with a double point and a diseme overline.
In musical scoreengraving, the undertie symbol is called an "elision slur" or "lyric slur", and is used to indicate synalepha: the elision of two or more spoken syllables into a single note; this is in contrast to the more common melisma, the extension of a single spoken syllable over multiple sung notes. Although rare in English texts, synalepha is often encountered in musical lyrics written in the Romance languages. In use, the undertie is placed between the words of the lyric that are to be sung as one note to prevent the space between them being interpreted as a syllable break. For example, in the printed lyric "the‿im - mor - tal air", the undertie between "the" and "im-" instructs the singer to elide these two syllables into one, thus reducing five spoken syllables into four sung notes.
The InternationalPhonetic Alphabet uses two type of ties: the ligature tie, above or below two symbols and the undertie between two symbols.
Ligature tie
The ligature tie, also called double inverted breve, is used to represent double articulation, affricates or prenasalized consonant in the IPA. It is mostly found above but can also be found below when more suitable. On computers, it is encoded with characters and, as an alternative when raisers might be interfering with the bow, .
Undertie
The undertie is used to represent linking in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example it is used to indicate liaison but can also be used for other types of sandhi. On computers, the character used is. This is a spacing character, not to be confused with the alternative form of the ligature tie, which is a combining character.
The double breve is used in the phonetic notation of the American Heritage Dictionary in combination with a double o, o͝o, to represent the near-close near-back rounded vowel. The triple breve below is used in the phonetic writingRheinische Dokumenta for three letter combinations. In the field of Computing, the Unicode character is used is used to represent concatenation of sequences in Z notation. For example, "s⁀t" represents the concatenation sequence of sequences called s and t, while the notation "⁀/q" is the distributed concatenation of the sequence of sequences called q. In proofreading, the undertie was used to indicate that word in a manuscript had been divided incorrectly by a space.. The indicator used in modern practice is convention is.
Encoding
The diacritic signs triple inverted breve, triple breve, and double inverted breve have not yet been encoded for computers. Unicode has characters similar to the tie:
