The ogonek and the anti-cedilla

In Polish orthography, some letters have small hooks below them that are called ogoneks or Polish hooks. Adam Twardoch has a marvelously thorough discussion of how they should appear in font design, and how they are often drawn badly. Phonetic transcription sometimes uses ogoneks under vowels to indicate nasality, so the ogonek gets used as a diacritic in linguistics even though in Polish it’s no more a diacritic than the extra hump that differentiates an m from an n. Unicode prefers the term ogonek, while Pullum and Ladusaw’s Phonetic Symbol Guide uses the term Polish hook. And in real-world phonetic transcription, the various hooks and curves that can appear below letters are often muddled together even in professional publications.

I’ve recently been trying to sort out the common names for these hooks and curves and tails along with their platonic shapes. The whole idea behind phonetic transcription is precisely describing details of pronunciation, but the actual practice of typesetting transcriptions is inconsistent and imprecise. Authors and publishers use the tools available to them, so a curved hook below a letter that’s open to the right might appear as an ogonek (a curve without a serif or ball), a tail (a vertical line that then curves to the right and ends in a ball), a reversed cedilla (a small vertical line that abruptly turns left and then curves around to the right), a reversed comma (a ball with a curving line below it), a half-ring (the left half of a true circle), or a hand-drawn approximation of any of these. And any of these might appear connected to the letter or not. At typical small print sizes, to tell the difference you need perfect printing and perfect eyesight. This is the pinnacle of human communication about human communication.