The tie is a symbol in the shape of an arc similar to a large breve, used in Greek, phonetic alphabets, and Z notation. It can be used between two characters with spacing as punctuation, or non-spacing as a diacritic. It can be above or below, and reversed. Its forms are called tie, double breve, enotikon or papyrological hyphen, ligature tie, and undertie.
The enotikon (ενωτικόν, enōtikón, lit. "uniter"), 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, ELOT 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. When a syllable was sung with three notes, this slur was used in combination with a double point and a diseme overline.
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.
The ligature tie, also called double inverted breve, is used to represent double articulation (e.g. [k͡p]), affricates (e.g. [t͡ʃ]) or prenasalized consonant (e.g. [m͡b]) in the IPA. It is mostly found above but can also be found below when more suitable (e.g. [k͜p]).
On computers, it is encoded with characters U+0361 ͡ combining double inverted breve and, as an alternative when raisers might be interfering with the bow, U+035C ͜ combining double breve below.
On computers, the character used is U+203F ‿ undertie, a spacing character, which is not to be confused with a͜b U+035C ͜ combining double breve below, a combining diacritic, used as an alternative to the ligature tie ab͡ U+0361 ͡ combining double inverted breve.
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
- 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.
The character tie is used for sequence concatenation in Z notation. It is encoded with U+2040 ⁀ character tie in Unicode. For example "s⁀t" represents the concatenation sequence of sequences called s and t; and the notation "⁀/q" is the distributed concatenation of the sequence of sequences called q.
|name||character||HTML code||Unicode||Unicode name||sample|
|double breve||͝||͝||U+035D||combining double breve||o͝o|
|ligature tie||͡||͡||U+0361||combining double inverted breve||/k͡p/|
|ligature tie below,
|͜||͜||U+035C||combining double breve below||/k͜p/|
|inverted undertie||⁔||⁔||U+2054||inverted undertie||o⁔o|
The diacritic signs triple inverted breve, triple breve, and double inverted breve have not yet been encoded for computers.
Unicode has characters similar to the tie:
- U+23DC ⏜ top parenthesis and U+23DD ⏝ bottom parenthesis
- U+2322 ⌢ frown and U+2323 ⌣ smile
- U+2050 ⁐ close up, which is a proofreading mark
- Nicholas, Nick. "Greek Unicode Issues: Greek /h/". 2005. Accessed 7 Oct 2014.
- Nicolas, Nick. "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation". 2005. Accessed 7 Oct 2014.
- Ελληνικός Οργανισμός Τυποποίησης [Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs, "Hellenic Organization for Standardization"]. ΕΛΟΤ 743, 2η Έκδοση [ELOT 743, 2ī Ekdosī, "ELOT 743, 2nd ed."]. ELOT (Athens), 2001. (Greek).
- Ancient Greek music, Martin Litchfield West, 1994, p. 267.
- SC2/WG2 N2594 - Proposal to encode combining double breve below
- Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS, 2002-03-20.
- Proposal to encode additional characters for the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Klaas Ruppel, Tero Aalto, Michael Everson, 2009-01-27.
- Proposal for 3 Additional Double Diacritics, 2002-05-10.
- Proposal to encode a combining diacritical mark for Low German dialect writing, Karl Pentzlin, 2008-10-25
- The Z Notation: a reference manual, J. M. Spivey.