Name that Mark

Question: What’s the name of the tiny curved mark that looks like a backward c, used under a c in French?

Answer: Cedilla. It’s the reason façade is pronounced "fa-SAHD" rather than "fa-CAHD."

Question: Vowels can be long or short, but also have an unaccented form. What is it called?

Answer: Schwa. You know it as an upside-down lowercase e. Linguists call it an unstressed mid-central vowel.

Question: Which two Romance languages use a tilde?

Answer: Spanish and Portuguese are the languages that use a tilde.

Question: The hacek, which adds an h-sound to whatever consonant it tops, is common to which language family?

Answer: Slavic. And the word is accordingly pronounced "HA-chek"

Question: What do you call the horizontal line placed over a vowel to indicate its length?

Answer: Macron. It’s often used in pronunciation guides, and also in the transliteration of Arabic and Persian.

Question: In the phrase “not one jot or tittle,” what is a tittle?

Answer: The dot over a lowercase i or j. The word tittle refers to the smallest pen stroke.

Question: An A with a ring above it symbolizes what unit of measure?

Answer: Angstrom, named for the Swedish physicist who invented spectroscopy whose last name is spelled with a ring over the A.

Question: Which word is another word for caret?

Answer: Circumflex. When used in mathematics, it is usually called a "hat" or "roof."

Question: What is the English word for those two dots over a vowel?

Answer: Diaeresis, spelled in many ways, is not as well known as the German word for the same double dot, umlaut.