inverted hat

inverted hat

English

Etymology

From its shape, supposed to resemble the profile of a hat turned upside-down.

Noun

inverted hat (plural inverted hats)

1. (nonstandard) A háček.
   • 1982, Paul Kiparsky, Explanation in Phonology, page 124

     In Russian the dentals t, d, s and the velars k, g, x become palatalized to č, ž, š […] . (The inverted hat (haček) represents palatalization.)

   • 1995 April 30th, Ron Meisenheimer, comp.soft-sys.sas, “ASCII chars and SAS titles”, message 1

     I’m using PC SAS and would like to get the symbol for infinity in the title of my output. […] When I [hold down the Alt key and enter 236] with SAS, it shows up correctly onscreen; but when it’s printed out, I get an ‘s’ with an inverted hat over it.

   • 2002 November 5th, Richard Proctor, perl.perl6.language, “Re: Unicode operators [Was: Re: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, demos]”, message 73

     The Gullimots [under latin-1] become T and t with inverted hats under Latin-2, oe and G with an inverted hat under Latin-3.

2. (nonstandard) = breve
   • 1997 October 1st, Ian James Abbott, uk.media.animation.anime, “EVA”, message 26

     evangeʹlical (-nj-) […] The…‘a’ has an inverted hat again; the ‘e’ and ‘i’ in ‘geli’ have inverted hats, making them short.

   • 2002 November 5th, Richard Proctor, perl.perl6.language, “Re: Unicode operators [Was: Re: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, demos]”, message 73

     The Gullimots [under latin-1] become T and t with inverted hats under Latin-2, oe and G with an inverted hat under Latin-3.

   • 2011 November 8th, Robert Bonomi, mailing.freebsd.questions, “‘Unprintable’ 8-bit characters”, message 13

     Now, one (obviously) has to have the basic ‘Roman’ alphabet. [¶] Then there are all the diacritical markings (accent, accent grave, dot umlaut, ring, bar, ‘hat’, inverted hat, etc.) for vowels.

Usage notes

• The shape suggested by hat is too vague to allow inverted hat the specificity to distinguish between a háček ( ˇ ) and a breve ( ˘ ). The term inverted circumflex avoids this problem, as it can refer to a háček (( ˆ ) → ( ˇ )), but never to a breve. The term’s ambiguousness is demonstrated in its two senses’ shared quotation (dated November 2002), where it occurs twice within the same sentence, first to refer to háčky, and then to a breve.