O͘

O͘ is one of the six Taiwanese Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) orthography. It is pronounced [ɔ]. Because Taiwanese is a tonal language the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first tone, the other five possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it.

  • Ó͘ ó͘ (second tone)
  • Ò͘ ò͘ (third tone)
  • Ô͘ ô͘ (fifth tone)
  • Ō͘ ō͘ (seventh tone)
  • O̍͘ o̍͘ (eighth tone)

History

The character was introduced by the Xiamen-based missionary Elihu Doty in the mid-nineteenth century, as a way to distinguish the Minnan 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 dictionary, where he replaced the ⟨o͘⟩ with 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, or ou.

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. Areca Books. Retrieved 21 August 2019.
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