A brief note on diacritics

This short note relates to remarks made by Peter Daniels in his 2006 article ‘On beyond alphabets’ on diacritics which he defines as markers that have a consistent phonological function in the particular script. From examples taken from French, Czech and other languages using the roman script, it is shown that the principal function of diacritics is to set up contrasts among various graphemes. This is extrapolated to the Arabic and Perso-Arabic scripts, where it is shown that the dots above and below graphemes are in effect diacritics.