Some typefaces differentiate Cyrillic style (top) and Latin style breve (bottom)
A breve (/ˈbriːv/ⓘBREEV, less often /ˈbrɛv/ⓘBREV, neuter form of the Latinbrevis "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ◌̆, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called brachy, βραχύ. It resembles the caron (◌̌, the wedge or háček in Czech, mäkčeň 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 /i/. (See: Latin IPA)
Breve vs. caron
Breve
Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ Y̆ y̆
Caron
Ǎ ǎ Ě ě 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/d͡ʒ/ (corresponding to ⟨g⟩ 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,[1] but the Unicode encoding is the same.
Contrastive use of Cyrillic kratka (for consonant [j]) and Latin breve (for short vowel [ĭ]) above и in Russian-Nenets dictionary
In Emilian, ĕ ŏ are used to represent [ɛ,ɔ] in dialects where also long [ɛː,ɔː] occur.
In other languages, it is used for other purposes.
In Romanian, A with breve represents /ə/, as in măr (apple).
G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish but may be pronounced [ɰ] in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.
On German language maps, a double breve is often used in abbreviated placenames that end in -b͝g., short for -burg, a common suffix originally meaning "castle". This prevents misinterpretation as -berg, another common suffix in placenames (meaning "mountain"). Thus, for example, Freib͝g. stands for Freiburg, not Freiberg.
The breve below is diacritic with the same appearance as the conventional breve, except that it is placed under the letter (or space) to be marked. There are just two precomposed character code-points: U+1E2AḪLATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH BREVE BELOW and U+1E2BḫLATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH BREVE BELOW. For other uses, it is rendered as a combining character, U+032E◌̮COMBINING BREVE BELOW.
Traditional editions of Spanish vocal sheet music use the 'breve below' to indicate elision. Modern editions tend to use a (freestanding) underscore.
^For example, that word 한글 han-geul is romanized in McCune-Reischauer as han'gŭl. The spelling han-geul is based on South Korea's Revised Romanization of Korean adopted in 2000 in part for ease in computer use, not on McCune-Reischauer. It is common, for convenience, to omit writing all diacritical marks in McCune-Reishchauer including breves, in which case the word is spelled hangul not han'gŭl. North Korea uses a variant of McCune-Reischauer that also utilizes breves for those two vowels.
