Latin omega
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Latin omega, or simply omega, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, based on the lowercase shape of the Greek letter omega ⟨ω⟩. It was included as a Latin letter in the Mann and Dalby 1982 revision of the African Reference Alphabet and has been used as such in some publications in the Kulango languages in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s. In other Kulango publications the letters V with hook ⟨Ʋ⟩ or Latin upsilon ⟨Ʊ⟩ are found instead.
The Italian humanist Giovan Giꞷrgio Trissino proposed in 1524 a reform of Italian orthography that included lowercase and uppercase omega for the open ⟨o⟩ sound ([ɔ]).[1]
He later reassigned it to the closed ⟨o⟩ ([o]).[2]
A variation of Latin omega, with a loop ⟨
⟩, has been used within the Initial Teaching Alphabet since the 1960s[3] to represent [uː] (the vowel in boot) alongside standard Latin omega, which represents [ʊ] (the vowel in book). The looped variant is scheduled to be encoded in Unicode 18.0 in September 2026.[4]
Encoding
[edit]| Preview | Ꞷ | ꞷ | ɷ | 𐞤 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA | LATIN SMALL LETTER OMEGA | LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED OMEGA | MODIFIER LETTER SMALL CLOSED OMEGA | ||||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 42934 | U+A7B6 | 42935 | U+A7B7 | 631 | U+0277 | 67492 | U+107A4 |
| UTF-8 | 234 158 182 | EA 9E B6 | 234 158 183 | EA 9E B7 | 201 183 | C9 B7 | 240 144 158 164 | F0 90 9E A4 |
| UTF-16 | 42934 | A7B6 | 42935 | A7B7 | 631 | 0277 | 55297 57252 | D801 DFA4 |
| Numeric character reference | Ꞷ | Ꞷ | ꞷ | ꞷ | ɷ | ɷ | 𐞤 | 𐞤 |
See also
[edit]- Ω ω : Greek letter Omega
- Ѡ ѡ : Cyrillic letter Omega
Bibliography
[edit]- ↑ Trissino, Giovan Giωrgio (1524). (in Italian) – via Wikisource.
ma quando ʃi prenderà tωʃco per veneno, ε tωrre per pigliare, ciωὲ infinito di tωglio vεrbo, alhora ʃi ʃcriverà per ω apεrto;[...] le quali tutte hanno le loro majuʃcule, che ʃono Ɛ, Ꞷ, Ӡ, J, V.
- ↑ D'Achille, Paolo (2011). "Trissino, Gian Giorgio in "Enciclopedia dell'Italiano"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Treccani. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
- ↑ Miller, Kirk (2024-12-13). "Unicode request for Initial Teaching Alphabet" (PDF).
- ↑ "Proposed New Characters: The Pipeline". Unicode. 23 April 2026. Archived from the original on 28 April 2026. Retrieved 23 June 2026.
- Pascal Boyeldieu, Stefan Elders, Gudrun Miehe. 2008. Grammaire koulango (parler de Bouna, Côte d’Ivoire). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. ISBN 978-3-89645-610-6
- Diocèse de Bondoukou Nassian. 1992. Syllabaire koulango : réservé aux élèves des cours bibliques en Koulango (Inspiré par les syllabaires de la Société Internationale de Linguistique, collection: « Je lis ma langue », Nouvelles Éditions Africaines / EDICEF). Nassian: Diocèse de Bondoukou.
- Michael Mann and David Dalby. 1987. A thesaurus of African languages: A classified and annotated inventory of the spoken languages of Africa with an appendix on their written representation. London: Hans Zell Publishers.
- Michael Everson, Denis Jacquerye, Chris Lilley. Proposal for the addition of ten Latin characters to the UCS Archived 2019-07-28 at the Wayback Machine. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, Document N4297, 2012-07-26.
- Henry Frieland Buckner. A Grammar of Maskωke, or Creek Language, Marion, Alabama, 1860.
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