Palatal hook
diacritical mark
The palatal hook (◌̡) is a hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to mark palatalized consonants. It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter that derives from a subscript letter j, and it is distinct from other IPA hooks that indicate retroflexion, implosion and rhotic vowels. Theoretically, it could be used on all IPA consonant letters – even on those used for palatal consonants – but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era. It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favor of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ was replaced with ⟨tʲ⟩).
The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ ʃ ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩ not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ ʆ ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. The same has been done with ⟨ɮ⟩: ⟨⟩. However, versions with the hook have been used and are supported by Unicode, excluding unattested ⟨ɮ⟩.
Palatal hooks are also used for Lithuanian dialectology in the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet), including the exceptional form ꞔ, which while graphically resembling a c plus palatal hook is actually a variant of the ᶃ once recommended by the IPA.
Scope
The palatal hook was introduced in 1921 and officially adopted in 1928. The last published IPA chart to support it was that of 1979. The following single non-palatal consonants appear on that chart.
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This entry incorporates text from “Palatal hook” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.