In typesetting, the hook or tail is a diacritic mark attached to letters in many alphabets. In shape it looks like a hook and it can be attached below as a descender, on top as an ascender and sometimes to the side. The orientation of the hook can change its meaning: when it is below and curls to the left it can be interpreted as a palatal hook, and when it curls to the right is called hook tail or tail and can be interpreted as a retroflex hook. It should not be mistaken with the hook above, a diacritical mark used in Vietnamese, or the rhotic hook, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
It could be argued that the hook was used to derive the letter ⟨J⟩ from the letter ⟨I⟩, or the letter Eng ⟨ŋ⟩ from the letter ⟨N⟩. However, these letters are usually not identified as being formed with the hook.
Most letters with hook are used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and many languages use them (along with capitals) representing the same sounds.
The hook often attaches to the top part of the letter, curling to the left or to the right, finishing the ascender if present. It may then be referred to as a crook, in some languages like French[1] more commonly than in English that is less successful in mitigating the semantic overload of the hook term.
If the hook attaches to the bottom part of the letter, it is often called a palatal hook if it curls to the left, or a retroflex hook if it curls to the right.
In some fonts, a retroflex hook on a vowel letter may be attached to the bottom serif. However, in IPA publications, as here, the hook is continuous with the right stroke without a serif in letters such as ⟨ᶏ⟩, ⟨ᶐ⟩, ⟨ᶖ⟩, ⟨𝼚⟩ and ⟨ᶙ⟩.
The retroflex hook occurs on alveolar and post-alveolar IPA letters; it also occurs on vowel letters, which currently indicates the effect of a retroflex consonant on the vowel, but formally was an option for writing rhotic vowels.
Note that the "fishhook r", ɾ, is shaped like a fishhook. It does not have a hook diacritic despite its misleading Unicode name "R with fishhook".
Unicode has the combining diacritics U+0321̡COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW and U+0322̢COMBINING RETROFLEX HOOK BELOW but these are not recommended to be used with letters, and should be used to illustrate the hooks themselves. Instead Unicode recommends the use of characters that already include the hook.[10]
The U+02DE˞MODIFIER LETTER RHOTIC HOOK is used to mark an r-colored vowel.[11]
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