Ogonek

Nasalization

The use of the ogonek to indicate nasality is common in the transcription of the indigenous languages of the Americas. This usage originated in the orthographies created by Christian missionaries to transcribe these languages. Later, the practice was continued by Americanist anthropologists and linguists who still follow this convention in phonetic transcription to the present day (see Americanist phonetic notation).

The ogonek is also used in academic transliteration of Old Church Slavonic. In Polish, Old Church Slavonic, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua, Tłįch Yatiì, Slavey, Dëne Sųłiné and Elfdalian it indicates that the vowel is nasalized. In Polish, ę is nasalized e in Polish, but ą is nasalized o, not a, because of a vowel shift; "ą", originally a long nasal "a", turned into a short nasal "o" when the distiction in vowel quantity disappeared.

Length

In Lithuanian, the nosinė (literally, "nasal") mark originally indicated vowel nasalization but around the late 17th century, nasal vowels gradually evolved into the corresponding long non-nasal vowels in most dialects. Thus, the mark is now de facto an indicator of vowel length (the length of etymologically non-nasal vowels is marked differently). The mark also helps to distinguish different grammatical forms with otherwise the same written form, but are pronounced differently.

Openness

In Rheinische Dokumenta, it marks vowels that are more open than those denoted by their base letters Ää, Oo, Öö. In two cases, it can be combined with umlaut marks.

E caudata and o caudata

The E caudata (ę), a symbol similar to an e with ogonek, evolved from a ligature of a and e in medieval scripts, in Latin and Irish palaeography. The O caudata of Old Norse^[6] (letter ǫ, with ǫ́)^[7][8] is used to write the open-mid back rounded vowel, /ɔ/. Medieval Nordic manuscripts show this "hook" in both directions, in combination with several vowels.^[9] Despite this distinction, the term "ogonek" is sometimes used in discussions of typesetting and encoding Norse texts, as o caudata is typographically identical to o with ogonek. Similarly, the E caudata was sometimes used to designate the vowel Norse [ɛ] or [æ].

Cedilla and comma

The ogonek is functionally equivalent to the cedilla and comma diacritics. If two of these three are used within the same orthography their respective use is restricted to certain classes of letters, i.e. usually the ogonek is used with vowels whereas the cedilla is applied to consonants. In handwritten text the marks may even look the same.

Encoding

LaTeX2e

In LaTeX2e, macro \k will typeset a letter with ogonek, if it is supported by the font encoding, e.g. \k{a} will typeset ą. (The default LaTeX OT1 encoding does not support it, but the newer T1 one does. It may be enabled by saying \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} in the preamble.)

However, \k{e} rather places the diacritic "right-aligned" with the carrying e (ę), suitably for Polish, while \textogonekcentered horizontally centers the diacritic with respect to the carrier, suitably for Native American Languages as well as for e caudata and o caudata. So \textogonekcentered{e} better fits the latter purposes. Actually, \k{o} (for ǫ) is defined to result in \textogonekcentered{o}, and \k{O} is defined to result in \textogonekcentered{O}.^[10]

The package TIPA, activated by using the command "\usepackage{tipa}", offers a different way: "\textpolhook{a}" will produce ą.