O͘ O͘, or o͘, is one of the six Hokkien vowels as written in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) orthography. It is pronounced [ɔ], like the pronunciation of ⟨aw⟩ in "law". The orthography also uses diacritics to indicate tone, and the standard letter without a diacritic represents the vowel in the first or fourth tone (with the fourth tone used in syllables with a stop consonant, i.e. ⟨-p⟩, ⟨-t⟩, ⟨-k⟩, ⟨-h⟩ /-ʔ/, and the first tone used in other cases). The other possible tone categories require one of the following tonal symbols to be written above it:
History The character was introduced by the Xiamen-based missionary Elihu Doty in the mid-nineteenth century, as a way to distinguish the Hokkien vowels /o/ and /ɔ/ (the latter becoming ⟨o͘⟩).[1] Since then it has become established in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī orthography, with only occasional deviations early in its usage – one example being Carstairs Douglas's 1873 Chinese–English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, where he replaced the ⟨o͘ ⟩ with ⟨ө̛ ⟩ (an o with a curl, similar to that of the English Phonotypic Alphabet),[2] and a second example being Tan Siew Imm's 2016 dictionary of Penang Hokkien, where she replaced the ⟨o͘ ⟩ with ⟨ɵ⟩.[3] ComputingIn the Unicode computer encoding, it is a normal Latin o followed by U+0358 ◌͘ COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT, and is not to be confused with the Vietnamese Ơ. This letter is not well-supported by fonts and is often typed as either o· (using the interpunct), o• (using the bullet), o' (using the apostrophe), oo (as used in Tâi-lô for Taiwanese Hokkien and Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese), or ou (as used in Wāpuro rōmaji for Japanese). References
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