 Examples are (from , called "ash"), (from , sometimes called "oethel"), the abbreviation (from , called "ampersand"), and (from or , the archaic medial form of, followed by an or , called "sharp S" or "eszett").A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters , , or the Romanian characters ă, â, î, ș, ț.Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, or distinguish between homographs (such as the Dutch words "een" meaning "a" or "an", and "één", meaning "one").