Horn
History and examples of use
The modern Vietnamese alphabet (or quốc ngữ) dates back from 1527, when Christian missionaries in that country transcribed the Vietnamese language into Latin for teaching and evangelization purposes. In the modern alphabet, the horn is attached to existing vowels to alter the pronunciation. There are two vowels produced in this way: Ơ/ơ, and Ư/ư. (Effectively, they create unrounded variants of existing rounded vowels U/u and Ô/ô.) In Vietnamese, additional diacritics can be added above or below to specify the intonation or tone. For example, acutes are used for writing vowels with raising tones, and breves are used for writing vowels with dipping tone. An acute can be added to ư to produce ứ, and a breve can be added to ơ to produce ờ.
Design
There are several requirements for drawing a horn properly:
- The stroke should look like part of the arc of a circle or ellipse. It should lead right, and turn upwards.
- The horn should lead from the base letter on the top right side. It should lead from the right, not the top.
- The horn should always be connected to the base letter. Placing a disconnected apostrophe or right single quotation mark next to it is not acceptable.
- The horn should never touch other diacritics that may be used with the letter, such as the breve, acute or tilde.
- The horn should not be confused with the Hook Above diacritic, which has a seperate purpose in Vietnamese.
In "Ω Times and Ω Helvetica Fonts Under Development: Step One", the designers designed "ơ" using the glyphs of the ring accent, the apostrophe and letter "o".