O͘
Letter of the Latin alphabet From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
O͘o͘ 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". Because Hokkien is a tonal language, the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first and fourth tone with the fourth and eighth tone always only used in syllables with a syllable stop (i.e. ⟨-p⟩, ⟨-t⟩, ⟨-k⟩, ⟨-h⟩ /-ʔ/), and the other six to eight 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

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 former 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
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