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 (,
henōtikón, "uniter", from "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 and .
International Phonetic Alphabet The
International Phonetic Alphabet uses two type of ties: the ligature tie (IPA #433), above or below two symbols and the undertie (IPA #509) between two symbols.
Ligature tie The ligature tie, also called double inverted breve, is used to represent
double articulation (e.g. ),
affricates (e.g. ) or
prenasalized consonants (e.g. ) in the IPA. It is mostly found above but can also be found below when more suitable (e.g. ). On computers, it is encoded with characters and, as an alternative when ascenders might be interfering with the bow, .
Undertie The undertie is used to represent linking (absence of a break) in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, it is used to indicate
liaison (e.g. ) but can also be used for other types of
sandhi. On computers, the character used is . This is a
spacing character, not to be confused with the alternative (below-letter) form of the ligature tie (a͜b ), which is a
combining character.
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet The
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses several forms of the tie or double breve: • The triple inverted breve or triple breve below indicates a
triphthong • The double inverted breve, also known as the ligature tie, marks a
diphthong • The double inverted breve below indicates a syllable boundary between vowels • The undertie is used for
prosody • The inverted undertie is used for prosody.
Vocal music scores In musical score
engraving, the undertie symbol is called an "elision slur" or "lyric slur", and is used to indicate
synalepha: the elision of two or more spoken syllables into a single note; this is in contrast to the more common
melisma, the extension of a
single spoken syllable over
multiple sung notes. Although rare in English texts, synalepha is often encountered in musical lyrics written in the
Romance languages. In use, the undertie is placed between the words of the lyric that are to be sung as one note to prevent the space between them being interpreted as a syllable break. For example, in the printed lyric "the‿im - mor - tal air", the undertie between "the" and "im-" instructs the singer to elide these two syllables into one, thus reducing five spoken syllables into four sung notes.
Other uses In
proofreading, the undertie was used to indicate that word in a manuscript had been divided incorrectly by a space. (See ). The indicator used in modern practice is . In the field of computing, the Unicode character is used to represent concatenation of sequences in
Z notation. For example, "s⁀t" represents the concatenation sequence of sequences called
s and
t, while the notation "⁀/q" is the distributed concatenation of the sequence of sequences called
q. The double breve is used in the phonetic notation of the
American Heritage Dictionary in combination with a double o, o͝o, to represent the
near-close near-back rounded vowel ( in
IPA). The triple breve below is used in the phonetic writing
Rheinische Dokumenta for three-letter combinations. In the practical
orthography of Central Alaskan Yup'ik, the tie is used in the
digraphs ‹ u͡g, u͡r › and the
trigraph ‹ u͡rr ›. == Encoding ==