The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign) is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"). Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which based on the Latin The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language, Cyrillic The Cyrillic alphabet or rather Cyrillic script is a writing system, shared by six Slavic national languages (Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Tuvan of the former Soviet Union and Mongolian). It is also used by many other languages of Eastern, and Greek The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent scripts Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps, and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken.

Contents

History

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex The apex is a mark roughly with the shape of an acute accent ( ´ ) which is placed over vowels to indicate that they are long, used in Latin Latin is an Italic language historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese are descended from Latin, while many others, especially European languages, including inscriptions to mark long vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic,.

The acute accent first appeared with this name in the polytonic orthography Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography which notated Ancient Greek phonology was used until 1982, when it was supplanted by the simplified monotonic orthography, which corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics of Ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC–6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe the Scandinavian languages,. Modern Greek has a stress accent In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense instead of a pitch accent, so the diacritic is now used to mark the stressed vowel of a word.

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense of a word in several languages:

Height

The acute accent marks the height In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome. There are more than 600 million native speakers worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and Africa, as well as many smaller regions scattered throughout the world. The six most widely spoken.

Length

The acute accent marks long vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, in several languages:

Palatalization

On consonant letters, the acute accent often represents a palatalized sound.

In Polish, it is known as kreska and is used over several letters — - four consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate palatalization, similar to the use of the háček in Czech and other Slavic languages, (e.g. sześć /ʂɛɕʨ/ "six"), however, in contrast to the hacek which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the kreska is more nearly vertical than an acute, and placed slightly right of center.[1]

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized t.

In the romanization of Macedonian, ǵ and represent the Cyrillic letters Ѓ and Ќ, which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though gj and kj (or đ and ć) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto-Indo-European phonemes /gʲ/ and /kʲ/.

Tone

In some tonal languages written with the Latin alphabet, such as Vietnamese written in the standard Quốc Ngữ system, and Mandarin Chinese written in the Pinyin romanization, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising (or second) tone, the alternative for the acute accent in Mandarin is number 2 after the syllable, e.g. lái = lai2.

In African languages and Athabaskan languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g., Yoruba apá 'arm', Nobiin féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti kaláwa 'boat', Navajo t’áá 'just'.

Disambiguation

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:

Emphasis

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, "Dit is ónze auto, niet die van jullie," "This is our car, not yours." In this example, ónze is merely an emphasized form of onze.

In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der (there), ex. "Der kan ikke være mange mennesker dér," meaning "There can't be many people there" or "Dér skal vi hen" meaning "That's where we're going".

Letter extension

á: long [ɔa], short [ɔ] and before [a]: [õ]
í/ý: long [ʊiː], short [ʊi]
ó: long [ɔu], [ɛu] or [œu], short: [œ], except Suðuroy: [ɔ]
When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɛ], except in Suðuroy where it is [ɔ]
ú: long [ʉu], short [ʏ]
When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɪ]
The (short) vowel a is open back rounded (ɒ), but á is open front unrounded (a) (and long).
Similarly, the (short) vowel e is open-mid front unrounded (ɛ), while (long) é is close-mid front unrounded (e).
Despite this difference, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation, just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length.
A sample extract of Icelandic.
á: [au(ː)]
é: long [jeɛː], short [jɛ]
í/ý: [i(ː)]
ó: [ou(ː)]
ú: [u(ː)]
All can be either short or long, but note that the pronunciation of é is not the same short and long.
Etymologically, vowels with an acute accent in these languages correspond to their Old Norse counterparts, which were long vowels but in many cases have become diphthongs. The only exception is é, which in Faroese has become æ.

Other uses

Diacritical marks

accent

acute accent ( ´ )
double acute accent ( ˝ )
grave accent ( ` )
double grave accent ( ̏ )

breve ( ˘ ) caron / háček ( ˇ ) cedilla ( ¸ ) circumflex ( ^ ) diaeresis / umlaut ( ¨ ) dot ( · )

anunaasika ( ˙ )
anusvara ( ̣ )
chandrabindu ( ँ ঁ ઁ ଁ ఁ )

hook / dấu hỏi ( ̉ ) horn / dấu móc ( ̛ ) macron ( ¯ ) ogonek ( ˛ ) ring / kroužek ( ˚, ˳ ) rough breathing / spiritus asper ( ) smooth breathing / spiritus lenis ( ᾿ )

Marks sometimes used as diacritics

apostrophe ( ) bar ( | ) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) hyphen ( ˗ ) tilde ( ~ ) titlo ( ҃ )

Use in English

As with other diacritical marks, a number of loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent used in the original language: these include sauté, roué, café, touché, fiancé, and fiancée. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none).

Acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final e is not silent, for example, maté, from Spanish mate.

For foreign terms used in English that have not been assimilated into English or are not in general English usage, italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée.

Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation: for example, spelling the word picked (normally [pɪkt]) as pickéd to indicate the pronunciation ['pɪkɪd]. The grave accent is also sometimes used for this purpose.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 character encoding include the letters á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the acute accent are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the acute accent as a separate character U+00B4 and a combining character, U+0301.

On Windows computers, letters with acute accents can be created by holding down the alt key and typing in a three-number code on the number pad to the right of the keyboard before releasing the alt key. Before the appearance of Spanish keyboards, Spanish speakers had to learn these codes if they wanted to be able to write acute accents, though some preferred using the Microsoft Word spell checker to add the accent for them. Some young computer users got in the habit of not writing accented letters at all.[citation needed] The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding) are:

The concept of dead key, a key that modified the meaning of the next key press, was developed to overcome this problem. This acute accent key was already present on typewriters where it typed the accent without moving the carriage, so a normal letter could be written on the same place.

On a UK Keyboard layout, these letters can also be made by holding Ctrl+Alt (or Alt Gr) and the desired letter. Some sites, such as Wikipedia or the babelfish automatic translator allow inserting such symbols by clicking on a link in a box.

On a Macintosh, an acute accent is placed on a vowel by pressing Option-e and then the vowel, which can also be capitalised; for example, á is formed by pressing Option-e and then 'a', and Á is formed by pressing Option-e and then Shift-a.

See also

The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letters using acute accent Áá Ǽǽ Ćć Éé Ǵǵ Íí Ḱḱ Ĺĺ Ḿḿ Ńń Óó Ǿǿ Ṕṕ Ŕŕ Śś Úú Ẃẃ Ýý Źź

historypalaeographyderivationsdiacriticspunctuationnumeralsUnicodelist of lettersISO/IEC 646

Notes

  1. ^ Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute
  2. ^ Norwegian language council, Diacritics (in Norwegian)
  3. ^ Svonni, E Mikael (1984). Sámegiel-ruoŧagiel skuvlasátnelistu. Sámiskuvlastivra. III. ISBN 9177160088.

External links

Look up acute accent in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Look up á, ć, or é in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Look up í, ĺ, ḿ, or ó in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Categories: Alphabetic diacritics

 

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