Diacritical Usage
A special triangular colon symbol is used in IPA to indicate that the preceding sound is long. Its form is that of two triangles, each a little larger than a point (dot) of a standard colon, pointing toward each other. It is available in Unicode as modifier letter triangular colon, Unicode U+02D0 (ː). A regular colon is often used as a fallback when this character is not available, and in the practical orthography of some languages which have a phonemic long/short distinction in vowels.
If the upper triangle is used without the lower one, it designates a "half-long" vowel.
Read more about this topic: Colon (punctuation)
Famous quotes containing the word usage:
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)