Appendix B Common Latin Diacritics and Ligatures

This appendix consists of two tables. The first table shows bitmaps for common Latin diacritics. The second table illustrates diacritics and ligatures used in various languages.

Diacritics are marks that are placed over, under, near, or through letters to indicate that the pronunciation differs from the unmarked form. (In many of the languages listed in the second table, diacritics appear with both lowercase and uppercase letters.) The diaeresis (two dots above a vowel) is a special case; it can be used to indicate a syllabic break (for example, coöp), but it can also be used as an umlaut, to indicate a vowel-sound change.

Ligatures were widely used in Medieval Latin script, but today only the ampersand (&), which means and, remains. Other ligatures have become common letters or punctuation characters in various languages. For example, in German, ß is the ligature for ss or sz; in several languages, æ is the ligature for ae; and in German, Russian, and Scandinavian languages, § is used to represent a paragraph.