Tie (typography)

The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Central Alaskan Yupʼik, Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, non-spacing as a diacritic, or (underneath) 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

Cyrillic transliteration

In the ALA-LC romanization for Russian, a tie symbol is placed over some combinations of Latin letters that are represented by a single letter in the Cyrillic alphabet, e.g., T͡S for Ц and i͡a for Я. This is not uniformly applied, however; some letters corresponding to common digraphs in English, such as SH for Ш and KH for Х do not employ the tie. In practice, the tie ligature is often omitted.

Greek

The enotikon (ἑνωτικόν, henōtikón, lit. "uniter", from ἑνωτικός "a serving to unite or unify"), papyrological hyphen, or Greek hyphen was a low tie mark found in late Classical and Byzantine papyri. 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. (Its companion mark was the hypodiastole, which showed that a series of letters should be understood 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 U+203F ‿ UNDERTIE and U+035C ◌͜◌ COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW.

The enotikon was also used in Greek musical notation, as a slur under two notes.