Palatal hook

The palatal hook (◌̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants.^[1] It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc. It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).^[1]

N with palatal hook, followed by eng, a palatal nasal and a retroflex n for comparison.

The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ʃ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩) not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ʆ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. However, versions with the hook have also been used and are supported by Unicode.

Palatal hooks are also used in Lithuanian dialectology by the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet)^[2] and in the orthography of Nez Perce^{[citation needed]}.

Computer encoding

Unicode includes both a combining character for the palatal hook, as well as several precomposed characters, including superscript letters with palatal hooks.

While LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK has been in Unicode since 1991, the rest were not added until 2005 or later. As such, font support for the latter characters is much less than for the former.

Appearance	Code point	Name
◌̡	U+0321	COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW
ᶀ	U+1D80	LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ꞔ	U+A7C4	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞔ	U+A794	LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶁ	U+1D81	LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼒	U+1DF12	LATIN SMALL LETTER DEZH DIGRAPH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶂ	U+1D82	LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶃ	U+1D83	LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH PALATAL HOOK
ꞕ	U+A795	LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶄ	U+1D84	LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶅ	U+1D85	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶪ	U+1DAA	MODIFIER LETTER L WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼓	U+1DF13	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH BELT AND PALATAL HOOK
ᶆ	U+1D86	LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶇ	U+1D87	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼔	U+1DF14	LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶈ	U+1D88	LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶉ	U+1D89	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼕	U+1DF15	LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED R WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼖	U+1DF16	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK AND PALATAL HOOK
ᶊ	U+1D8A	LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶋ	U+1D8B	LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ƫ	U+01AB	LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶵ	U+1DB5	MODIFIER LETTER T WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼗	U+1DF17	LATIN SMALL LETTER TESH DIGRAPH WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶌ	U+1D8C	LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶍ	U+1D8D	LATIN SMALL LETTER X WITH PALATAL HOOK
Ᶎ	U+A7C6	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
ᶎ	U+1D8E	LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK
𝼘	U+1DF18	LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH PALATAL HOOK

References

1. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1999.
2. Tumasonis, Vladas; Pentzlin, Karl (2011-05-24). "N4070: Second revised proposal to add characters used in Lithuanian dialectology to the UCS" (PDF). ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.