The palatal hook () is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

to represent palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc. It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a

superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...

j following the consonant (i.e., becomes ). The IPA recommended that esh () and

ezh Ezh (Ʒ ʒ) , also called the "tailed z", is a letter whose lower case form is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example, the pronunciation of "si" in ''vi ...

() not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: and . However, versions with the hook have also been used and are supported by Unicode. Palatal hooks are also used in Lithuanian dialectology by the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet) and in the orthography of Nez Perce.

Computer encoding

Unicode includes both a

combining character In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode also ...

for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including

letters with palatal hooks. While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest were not added until 2005 or later. As such,

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.

References

{{Reflist Hook, palatal Phonetic transcription symbols