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O͘

Letter of the Latin alphabet

O͘

O͘, or o͘, is one of the six Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) orthography. It is pronounced, like the pronunciation of ⟨aw⟩ in "law". The orthography also uses diacritics to indicate tone, and the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first or fourth tone. The other possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it:Ó͘ ó͘ 《陰上／阴上》 Ò͘ ò͘ 《陰去／阴去》 Ô͘ ô͘ 《陽平／阳平》 Ǒ͘ ǒ͘ 《陽上／阳上》 Ō͘ ō͘ 《陽去／阳去》 O̍͘ o̍͘ 《陽入／阳入》 Ŏ͘ ŏ͘ / Ő͘ ő͘

O͘
O͘ o͘

O͘, or o͘, is one of the six Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) orthography. It is pronounced [ɔ], like the pronunciation of ⟨aw⟩ in "law". The orthography also uses diacritics to indicate tone, and the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first or fourth tone (with the fourth tone used in syllables with a stop consonant, i.e. ⟨-p⟩, ⟨-t⟩, ⟨-k⟩, ⟨-h⟩ /-ʔ/, and the first tone used in other cases). The other possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it:

  • Ó͘ ó͘ (second tone) 《陰上／阴上》
  • Ò͘ ò͘ (third tone) 《陰去／阴去》
  • Ô͘ ô͘ (fifth tone) 《陽平／阳平》
  • Ǒ͘ ǒ͘ (sixth tone, used in Quanzhou-descended dialects) 《陽上／阳上》
  • Ō͘ ō͘ (seventh tone) 《陽去／阳去》
  • O̍͘ o̍͘ (eighth tone) 《陽入／阳入》
  • Ŏ͘ ŏ͘ / Ő͘ ő͘ (ninth tone, high rising in Taiwanese Hokkien)

History

Carstairs Douglas's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy used a barred o with curl very similar to the one on the far left of the 4th row of letters from the top of this image to represent the /ɔ/ sound that Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) usually represented with O͘ o͘

The character was introduced by the Xiamen-based missionary Elihu Doty in the mid-nineteenth century, as a way to distinguish the Hokkien vowels /o/ and /ɔ/ (the latter becoming ⟨o͘⟩).[1] Since then it has become established in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography, with only occasional deviations early in its usage – one example being Carstairs Douglas's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, where he replaced the ⟨o͘ ⟩ with ⟨ө̛ ⟩ (an o with a curl, similar to that of the English Phonotypic Alphabet),[2] and a second example being Tan Siew Imm's 2016 dictionary of Penang Hokkien, where she replaced the ⟨o͘ ⟩ with ⟨ɵ⟩.[3]

Computing

In the Unicode computer encoding, it is a normal Latin o followed by U+0358 ◌͘ COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT, and is not to be confused with the Vietnamese Ơ. This letter is not well-supported by fonts and is often typed as either o· (using the interpunct), o• (using the bullet), o' (using the apostrophe), oo (as used in Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien and Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese), or ou (as used in Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese).

References

  1. ↑ Klöter, Henning. "The History of Peh-oe-ji" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-05-29.
  2. ↑ Douglas, Carstairs (1990) [1873]. Chinese English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken of Amoy. Taipei: Southern Materials Center. ISBN 957-9482-32-2.
  3. ↑ Tan, Siew Imm (2016). Penang Hokkien-English Dictionary. Sunway University Press. Retrieved 21 August 2019.