háček

See also HACEK, and Háček

English

Alternative forms

Click to see the fourteen variant forms, with their dates of first attestation, and exegetic notes.

háček [1951], haček [1956], hacek [1959], haċek [1967], hachek [1969], hatcheck [1981], hatschek [1983], hatchek [1988], hacheck [1990], hac̬ek [1992], haczek [1995], hácek [1997], haĉek [2002], haceck [2003] The four spellings with any considerable currency, in descending order of frequency, are háček, haček, hacek, and hachek; the other ten attested spellings are all rare. There is considerable variety in usage in the representation of the central consonant, /tʃ/, including: the Anglicising digraph, ch, trigraph, tch, and tetragraph tsch; a bare c; the Polonising digraph, cz (compare the English Czech with the Czech Čech); a c with a tečka, ċ; a c with a circumflex, ĉ (perhaps a conscious Esperantism); and a c with a háček below, c̬ (used to refer to the diacritic specifically when it is written beneath a letter). The terminal -k is sometimes extended to -ck, but not in conjunction with any diacritic use.

Háčky adorning, from left to right:
cee, e, el, umlauted u (used in pinyin), the obsolete Cyrillic letter ksi, and sigma (used in Cypriot Greek)

Etymology

First attested in 1951; from the Czech háček (“háček”, literally “little hook”), the diminutive form of hák (“hook”, from the Middle High German hāken, from the Old High German hāko, “hook”, from the Proto-Germanic *hakô, “hook”, from the Proto-Indo-European *keg-, *keng-, “peg”, “hook”) + the diminutive suffix -ek; parallel to the formation of the English hooklet and the German Häkchen; cognate with the German Haken (“hook”), the Old English haca (“hook”, “door-fastening”), and the Modern English hook and hake (more information sub verbis).

Pronunciation

Click to see enPR, IPA, and X-SAMPA pronunciatory transcriptions for the Czech pronunciation and for thirteen English accents and speech standards.

(Czech) IPA: [ˈɦaːtʃɛk], X-SAMPA: ["h\a:tSEk], audio (file) (Australia) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhaːtʃek/, X-SAMPA: /"ha:tSek/ (Boston, Northern England) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhaːtʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"ha:tSEk/ (GenAm, US) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhɑtʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"hAtSEk/ (Geordie) enPR: hăʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhatʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"hatSEk/ (New Zealand) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhɐːtʃek/, X-SAMPA: /"h6:tSek/ (NY) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhɑətʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"hA@tSEk/ (RP) enPR: hăʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhætʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"h{tSEk/ (SAE) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈɦɑːtʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"h\A:tSEk/ (Scotland) enPR: hăʹchĕk, häʹchĕk; IPA: /ˈhatʃɛk/; X-SAMPA: /"hatSEk/ (UK, Estuary English) enPR: häʹchĕk, IPA: /ˈhɑːtʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"hA:tSEk/

Noun

háček (plural háčeks or háčky)

1. (orthography and typography) A diacritical mark: 〈ˇ〉, usually resembling an inverted circumflex, but in the cases of ď, Ľ, ľ, and ť, taking instead a form similar to a prime: 〈′〉.
   • 1948, Bohumil Emil Mikula, Progressive Czech (Bohemian), page 6

     The caret (ˇ), háček, is used over the following consonants: c, d, n, t, r, s, and z to indicate the soft sound.

   • 1951, Hans Jakob Polotsky, Notes on Gurage Grammar, page 5

     Linguistic forms had to be set in ordinary roman type and the capital C of Cäxa had to be left without a háček.

   • 1956, Morris Halle [ed.], For Roman Jakobson, page 332

     Good Teutonic Kitsch looks rather forlorn and out of place wearing a Bohemian háček over its shrunken hind quarters. But the high traditions of scholarship must be maintained, and on these pages Meester Kitsch will masquerade as Mr. Kič.

   • 1966, Charles Ernest Bazell et al. [eds.], In Memory of J.R. Firth, page 205

     In the system used here and elsewhere in this article for Bantu tone, low syllables are unmarked, high syllables have an acute accent, and rising syllables a haček respectively; thus a, á, ǎ.

   • 1967 July, The Bodleian Library Record VIII:i, page 3

     Its keyboard includes a fair selection of the diacritical marks needed for cataloguing: the acute, grave, and circumflex accents, the cedilla, diæresis, short-sign, tilde, haček, and superscript circle.

   • 1970, Visible Language IV, page 322

     The German form Asch is obviously preferable to a háček-less As.

   • 1977, Folia Slavica I–II, page 82

     Unsystematic use of diacritics (the háček (ˇ), čárka (´), tečka (˙)) marks the Strahov copy…as no earlier than mid-15th century.

   • 1983, David Ambrose, Lesotho, page 457

     The second diacritic is the hatschek applied to the aspirated ts sound, written tš.

   • 1984, Edward Stankiewicz, Grammars and Dictionaries of the Slavic Languages from the Middle Ages up to 1850, page 3

     [Jan Hus (1369–1415)] replaced the medieval system of digraphs with one of diacritics, among which the dot (later replaced by a háček) marked the palatals ṅ, ṫ, ṙ, ċ, ż, ṡ and l̇ ( = ł) and an acute accent (čárka) the long vowels á, ó, ú, í, ié.

   • 1991, Peter Hugh Reed, American Record Guide LIV:ii, page 69

     The printer had no hatchek — the flattened “v” that appears over letters in Czech — to put over Dvořak’s R. So somebody laboriously inked in all the hatcheks.

   • 1992, Kate Burridge and Werner Enninger [eds.], Diachronic Studies on the Languages of the Anabaptists, page 76

     Full voicing is indicated by an understrike hac̬ek, i.e. [b̬], under the corresponding consonant.

   • 1997, Victor A. Friedman, “Linguistic form and content in the Romani-language press of the Republic of Macedonia” in The Typology and Dialectology of Romani, eds. Yaron Matras, Peter Bakker, and Hristo Kyuchukov, page 185

     RS follows standard East European practice of using the wedge (haček, čiriklo) to indicate the strident palatals (š, ž, č, dž).

   • 2000, Jarda Cervenka, Revenge of Underwater Man and other stories, page 28

     “It should be Čermák, with a háček above the C and a čárka above the a, long a. Shouldn’t it be?”

   • 2001, Felix K. Ameka, “Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe” in Typological Studies in Language XLIV: Ideophones, eds. Friedrich Karl Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, page 46, endnote 2

     The hatchek marks a rising tone.

   • 2002, Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky QWERTY, page 34

     háček used to signify the third tone (wǔ — ‘five’)

   • 2003 March 25th, jizlobber, alt.visa.us.marriage-based, “Re: Accents in forms” (see the original message)

     I can get umlauts and accents, but can’t find any hacecks for the Czech characters.

   • 2004, Alan Timberlake, A Reference Grammar of Russian, page 24

     «Ч» is transliterated as «č», using the Czech háček.

   • 2005 December 29th, Stavroula Varella, Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek, page 46

     Another orthographic practice…was developed…in the twentieth century: this is the adoption of the hacek for the representation of the Cypriot postalveolar fricatives and affricates, which are otherwise not distinguished by the normal characters of the Greek alphabet alone. It was not until very recently, therefore, that the spellings <σ̌>, <τσ̌>, <ζ̌> and <τζ̌>, for [ʃ], [tʃ], [ʒ] and [dʒ] respectively, became available.

   • 2006 March 6, Ralph W. Fasold and Jeff Connor-Linton [eds.], An Introduction to Language and Linguistics, pages 23–24

     In other transcription systems commonly used in linguistics books, [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], and [dʒ] are written with hatchecks: [š], [ž], [č], [ǰ].

   • 2006 December 8th, Mary Betik Trojacek, Beyond Ellis Island, page 17

     My father always wrote Bětik with a little “v” called haĉek, above the “e”; Marušaks placed the haĉek above the “s”.

   • 2007, Erik Gren, Orientalia Suecana LVI, page 251

     Here I will use ō, ū, ī, haċek letters č, š, ǰ, and ġ for the voiced counterpart of q.

   • 2009, Autumn Pierce, Angličtina, page 28

     There are no separate keys for háčky and čárky.

   • For more examples of the usage of this term see the citations pages for háček, haček, hacek, haċek, hachek, hatcheck, hatschek, hǎcek, hatchek, hacheck, hac̬ek, haczek, háçek, hácek, haĉek, haceck, and háčky.

Derived terms

háček coefficient (optics)

háček language (informal)

háčekless (rare)

Synonyms

Click to see háček’s fifteen attested synonyms, with their usage contexts, and a survey of other sources’ coverages.

(háček diacritic): caret (non-standard), caron, chevron (informal), čiriklo (when used in Romani), clicka‎ (rare), hat (non-standard, rare), hook (rare), inverted caret (informal), inverted circumflex (informal), inverted hat (non-standard), mäkčeň (when used in Slovak), palatal hook (rare, when it takes the form of a prime), strešica (when used in Slovene), wedge (US), wing (informal, rare) A survey of eleven other lexicographical sources reveals that LookWAYup and Vocabulary.com fully define wedge in the relevant sense, whilst Dictionary.com and the Random House Unabridged Dictionary [1997] give the typographic-cum-orthographic sense the one-word gloss “haček”, and WordNet 3.0 codefines it with háček; the six other sources, namely the American Heritage Dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Dictionarist.com, the Oxford English Dictionary [2nd ed., 1989], and the UltraLingua English Dictionary, all omit this sense of wedge. All eleven sources list and define háček. Not one of the sources lists an entry for čiriklo, clicka, inverted caret, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, mäkčeň, palatal hook, or strešica; neither does any of them include the relevant sense in any of their entries for caret, chevron, hat, hook, or wing.

Coordinate terms

Click to see two lists, one of thirty-five diacritics used in Latin-derived scripts and another of four Czech diacritics, both of which include háček.

(diacritics used in Latin-derived scripts): acute accent (above 〈´〉, below 〈ˏ〉, double 〈˝〉), apostrophe 〈ʼ〉, breve (above 〈˘〉, below 〈 ̮〉), bridge 〈 ̪〉, candrabindu 〈 ̐〉, cedilla 〈¸〉, circumflex (above 〈ˆ〉, below 〈 ̭〉), comma (above right 〈 ̕〉, below 〈 ̦〉, reversed 〈ʽ〉, turned 〈ʻ〉), diaeresis (above 〈¨〉, below 〈 ̤〉), dot (overdot 〈˙〉, underdot 〈 ̣〉), grave accent (above 〈`〉, below 〈ˎ〉, double 〈 ̏〉), háček (above 〈ˇ〉, below 〈 ̬〉), half ring (left 〈ʿ〉, right 〈ʾ〉), hook (above 〈 ̉〉, palatal 〈 ̡〉, retroflex 〈 ̢〉, rhotic 〈˞〉), horn 〈 ̛〉, inverted breve (above 〈 ̑〉, below 〈 ̯〉, double 〈 ͡ 〉), inverted bridge 〈 ̺〉, inverted double arch 〈 ̫〉, left angle 〈 ̚〉, low line (single 〈 ̲〉, double 〈 ̳〉), macron (above 〈¯〉, below 〈ˍ〉), minus 〈˗〉, ogonek 〈˛〉, overline (single 〈‾〉, double 〈 ̿〉), plus 〈˖〉, ring (above 〈˚〉, below 〈 ̥〉), seagull 〈 ̼〉, solidus (long 〈 ̸〉, short 〈 ̷〉), square 〈 ̻〉, stroke (long 〈 ̶〉, short 〈 ̵〉), tack (down 〈˕〉, left 〈 ̘〉, right 〈 ̙〉, up 〈˔〉), tilde (above 〈˜〉, below 〈 ̰〉, double 〈 ͠ 〉, middle / overlay 〈 ̴〉, vertical 〈 ̾〉), umlaut 〈¨〉, vertical line (above 〈ˈ〉, below 〈ˌ〉, double 〈 ̎〉), x 〈ˣ〉 (Czech diacritics): čárka 〈´〉, háček 〈ˇ〉, kroužek 〈˚〉, tečka 〈˙〉

Translations

háček diacritic

• Arabic: كارون (ar) (kārūn, karon) m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 揚抑符 (cmn), 扬抑符 (cmn) (yángyìfú), 倒折音符 (cmn) (dǎozhéyīnfú)

• Czech: háček (cs) m
• Dutch: háček (nl) c
• Esperanto: haĉeko (eo)
• Estonian: katus (et)
• Finnish: hattu (fi)
• French: hatchek (fr) m, caron (fr) m, háček (fr) m, chevron (fr) m, accent hirondelle (fr) m
• German: Hatschek (de) n or m, Caron (de) n, Häkchen (de) n
• Hungarian: hacsek (hu)
• Japanese: ハーチェク (ja) (hācheku)

• Lakota: ičášleče
• Lithuanian: paukščiukas (lt)
• Polish: daszek (pl) m
• Russian: гачек (ru) (gáček) m, гачка (ru) (gáčka) f
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: квачица (sh) f, ква̏ка (sh) f

  Roman: kvačica (sh) f, kvȁka (sh) f

• Slovak: mäkčeň (sk) m
• Slovene: kljukica (sl) f, strešica (sl) f
• Spanish: carón (es) m, háček (es) m
• Swedish: hake (sv) c
• Venetian: pipa f

References

Click to see cited authorities, with descriptions of their respective entries’ contents.

“‖háček” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary [2nd ed., 1989]   (‖ˈhaːtʃɛk, ˈhæ-) “above a consonant, it indicates palatalization (as č (tʃ), š (ʃ))…above e, it indicates the vowel phoneme jatʹ” includes four quotations (1953, 1959, 1980, 1984) “ha•ček” listed in the Random House Unabridged Dictionary   hä'chek “a diacritical mark (ˇ)…[used in] Czech and Lithuanian, and in some systems of phonetic transcription” “ha·ček” listed in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language [4th ed., 2000]   häʹchĕk' ← Czech háček, diminutive of hák […] ← Middle High German hāken, ← Old High German hāko ← Proto-Indo-European keg- “háček” listed in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English [3rd ed., 2008]   /ˈhɑːtʃɛk, ˈha-/ “a diacritic mark (ˇ)…[used] in Slavic and other languages.” ← Czech, diminutive of hák ‘hook’ “háček” defined by Dictionarist.com   “diacritical mark (inverted circumflex)…if placed over the letter ‘c’ it changes the sound to ‘ch’” “háček” listed in the Collins English Dictionary online [December 2011]   ˈhɑːtʃɛk “a diacritic mark (ˇ)…used in Slavonic languages to indicate various forms of palatal articulation, as in…č and…ř used in Czech” “ha·ček” defined by Dictionary.com   /ˈhɑtʃɛk/ Also, há·ček. Also called wedge. 1950–55; ← Czech háček, diminutive of hák hook ← German

External links

• Háček on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “Háček” discussed as a part of Typo.cz’s Diacritics Project.

Anagrams

• Cheka, hecka

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Czech

Etymology

hák +‎ -ek. The diminutive form of hák (“hook”); compare the German Häkchen.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /ˈɦaːtʃɛk/, X-SAMPA: /"h\a:tSEk/

• audio

  (file)

Noun

háček m

1. little hook (diminutive form of hák)
2. fishhook
3. háček (diacritic)
4. catch, snag (a concealed difficulty, especially in a deal or negotiation)

Declension

    declension of háček

	singular	plural
nominative	háček	háčky
genitive	háčku	háčků
dative	háčku	háčkům
accusative	háček	háčky
vocative	háčku	háčky
locative	háčku	háčcích
instrumental	háčkem	háčky

See also

• udice
• čárka

Descendants

• English: háček
• Japanese: ハーチェク (hācheku)
• Russian: гачек (gáček)

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French

Noun

háček m (plural háčeks)

1. háček