breve

alt=Some typefaces differentiate Cyrillic style (top) and Latin style breve (bottom)|thumb|PT Fonts|Some typefaces differentiate Cyrillic style (top) and Latin style breve (bottom)|class=skin-invert-image A breve ( , less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark , shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called ', . It resembles the caron (, the wedge or in Czech, in Slovak) but is rounded, in contrast to the angular tip of the caron. In many forms of Latin, is used for a shorter, softer variant of a vowel, such as "Ĭ", where the sound is nearly identical to the English . (See: Latin IPA) {| class="wikitable" |+Breve vs. caron !Breve |Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ğ ğ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ Y̆ y̆ |- !Caron |Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǧ ǧ Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ Y̌ y̌ |}

== Length == The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron (), which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used that way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg and other languages. However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels. It is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short. If the vowel length is unknown, a breve as well as a macron are used in historical linguistics (Ā̆ ā̆ Ē̆ ē̆ Ī̆ ī̆ Ō̆ ō̆ Ū̆ ū̆ Ȳ̆ ȳ̆). In Cyrillic script, a breve is used for Й. In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (semivowel U) and in the Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet uses a breve on Ӂ to represent a voiced postalveolar affricate (corresponding to before a front vowel in the Latin script for Moldovan). In Chuvash, a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (E-breve). In Itelmen orthography, it is used for Ӑ, О̆ and Ў. The traditional Cyrillic breve differs in shape and is thicker on the edges of the curve and thinner in the middle, as opposed to the Latin one, but the Unicode encoding is the same.