page_title: Apex (diacritic)
section_title: Usage in Middle Vietnamese
hierarchical_section_title: Apex (diacritic) / Usage in Middle Vietnamese
caption_attribution_description: English: An example of a word containing a breve, acute, and apex, for comparison, in Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (1651). (Entry “dĕóu᷄”, column 169, PDF page 96.)Tiếng Việt: Một thí dụ từ có cả dấu trăng, dấu sắc, và apex, để dễ so sánh, trong Từ điển Việt-Bồ-La (1651). (Mục từ “dĕóu᷄”, cột 169, trang PDF 96.)
context_page_description: In written Latin, the apex is a mark with roughly the shape of an acute accent which is placed over vowels to indicate that they are long.
  The shape and length of the apex can vary, sometimes within a single inscription. While virtually all apices consist of a line sloping up to the right, the line can be more or less curved, and varies in length from less than half the height of a letter to more than the height of a letter. Sometimes, it is adorned at the top with a distinct hook, protruding to the left. Rather than being centered over the vowel it modifies, the apex is often considerably displaced to the right. In the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, the apex is described as a "linea jacens super litteram aequaliter ducta", and it is said to be counted among the letter shapes by the ancient Romans.
  Essentially the same diacritic, conventionally called in English the acute accent, is used today for the same purpose of denoting long vowels in a number of languages with Latin orthography, such as Irish, Hungarian, Czech and Slovak, as well as for the historically long vowels of Icelandic.
context_section_description: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Vietnamese alphabet incorporated both acute and apex marks. The acute indicates rising tone, while the apex marked final nasalization. In his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, Alexandre de Rhodes makes it clear that the apex is a distinct diacritic:
  The third sign, finally, is the apex, which in this language is entirely necessary because of a difference in the ending [i.e. of a word], which the apex makes entirely distinct from the ending that m or n makes, with a meaning entirely diverse in words in which it is employed. However, this sign, namely the apex, only affects o᷄ and u᷄, at the end of a word, as ao᷄ "bee", ou᷄ "grandfather" or "lord". It is pronounced, however, such that neither the lips touch together nor the tongue touches the palate.
  — Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum
  The apex appears atop ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩, and less commonly ⟨ơ⟩. As with other accent marks, a tone mark can appear atop the apex.
  According to canon law historian Roland Jacques, the apex indicated a final labial-velar nasal /ŋ͡m/, an allophone of /ŋ/ that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. The apex apparently fell out of use during the mid-18th century, being unified with ⟨-ng⟩ (representing /ŋ/), in a major simplification of the orthography, though the Vietnamese Jesuit Philipphê Bỉnh (Philiphê do Rosario) continued to use the old orthography into the early 19th century. In Pierre Pigneau de Behaine and Jean-Louis Taberd's 1838 Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, the words ao᷄ and ou᷄ became ong and ông, respectively.
  The Middle Vietnamese apex is known as dấu sóng or dấu lưỡi câu in modern Vietnamese. Though it has no official Unicode representation, one possible approximation is U+1DC4 ◌᷄ COMBINING MACRON-ACUTE. The apex is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing.
caption: The entry for dĕóu᷄ shows distinct breves (ĕ), acutes (ó), and apices (u᷄).
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