Acute accent explained

Char:◌́
Acute accent
Unicode: (diacritic)
See Also:
  • (symbol)
  • (symbol)

pronounced as /notice/

The acute accent,

, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.

Uses

History

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.

Pitch

Ancient Greek

See also: Ancient Greek accent. The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as "sharpened".

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages:

stress, which is variable in Bulgarian, is not usually indicated in Bulgarian except in dictionaries and sometimes in homonyms that are distinguished only by stress. However, Bulgarian usually uses the grave accent to mark the vowel in a stressed syllable, unlike Russian and Ukrainian, which use the acute accent.

á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height (see below).

sometimes added to mark syllabic stress, when it can help to distinguish between homographs: Ukrainian: за́мок vs. Ukrainian: замо́к, as follows:,,,,,,, . Commonly used in dictionaries, readers, and some children's books.

word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is by the use of the acute accent. In the Welsh orthography, it can be on any vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú, , or ý. Examples: Welsh: casáu pronounced as /cy/ "to hate", Welsh: sigarét pronounced as /cy/ "cigarette", Welsh: ymbarél pronounced as /cy/ "umbrella".

Height

The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages.

Length

Long vowels

sometimes used to represent the apex in modern orthography.

are the long versions of . The accent is known as Czech: čárka. To indicate a long in the middle or at the end of a word, a Czech: [[ring (diacritic)|kroužek]] ("ring") is used instead, to form .

are the long equivalents of the vowels . (see double acute accent) are the long equivalents of . Both types of accents are known as Hungarian: hosszú ékezet (Hungarian: hosszú means long). The letters and are two long vowels but they are also distinct in quality, rather than being the long equivalents of and (see below in Letter extension).

are the long equivalents of the vowels, the accent affects pronunciation and meaning, e.g. Irish: [[Seán]] ("John") but Irish: sean ("old").[6] The accent is known as a Irish: (síneadh) fada pronounced as /ga/ ("long (sign)"), which is also used in Hiberno-English.

are the long versions of . Sometimes, is used as the long version of, but is used more often. Sometimes, the short-lived Old Icelandic long (also written) is written using an acute-accented form,, or a version with a macron,, but usually it is not distinguished from from which it is derived by u-mutation.

the acute accent is called Slovenian: dĺžeň in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels, dĺžeň is used to mark syllabic consonants, which are the long counterparts of syllabic .

Short vowels

in the official orthography, é is used for short pronounced as /[e]/, and ó is used for short pronounced as /[u]/.

Palatalization

A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages.

In Polish, such a mark is known as a Polish: kreska ("stroke") and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the Czech: [[háček]] in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. Czech: sześć pronounced as /pl/ "six"). However, in contrast to the Czech: háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the Polish: kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the Polish: kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center.[7] A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Ukrainian: [[Łacinka]]. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.

In Serbo-Croatian, as in Polish, the letter (ć) is used to represent a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate pronounced as //t͡ɕ//.

In the romanization of Macedonian, (ǵ) and (ḱ) represent the Cyrillic letters (ѓ) (Gje) and (ќ) (Kje), 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 pronounced as //ɡʲ// and pronounced as //kʲ//.

uses the acute for palatalization as in Polish: (ć dź ń). Lower also uses (ŕ ś ź), and Lower previously used (ḿ ṕ ẃ) and (b́ f́), also written as (b' f'); these are now spelt as (mj pj wj) and (bj fj).

Tone

In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyin romanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofo semi-syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising tone. In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: lái = lai2. In Cantonese Yale, the acute accent is either tone 2, or tone 5 if the vowel(s) are followed by 'h' (if the number form is used, 'h' is omitted): má = ma2, máh = ma5.

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'.

The acute accent is used in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.

Disambiguation

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

Emphasis

Letter extension

á: long pronounced as /[ɔa]/, short pronounced as /[ɔ]/ and before pronounced as /[a]/: pronounced as /[õ]/

í/ý: long pronounced as /[ʊiː]/, short pronounced as /[ʊi]/

ó: long pronounced as /[ɔu]/, pronounced as /[ɛu]/ or pronounced as /[œu]/, short: pronounced as /[œ]/, except Suðuroy: pronounced as /[ɔ]/

When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced pronounced as /[ɛ]/, except in Suðuroy where it is pronounced as /[ɔ]/

ú: long pronounced as /[ʉu]/, short pronounced as /[ʏ]/

When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced pronounced as /[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, in most of the cases, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation, just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length.

á: pronounced as /[au(ː)]/

é: long pronounced as /[jeɛː]/, short pronounced as /[jɛ]/

í/ý: pronounced as /[i(ː)]/

ó: pronounced as /[ou(ː)]/

ú: pronounced as /[u(ː)]/

All can be either short or long, but 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

English

As with other diacritical marks, a number of (usually French) loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language: these include attaché, blasé, canapé, cliché, communiqué, café, décor, déjà vu, détente, élite, entrée, exposé, mêlée, fiancé, fiancée, papier-mâché, passé, pâté, piqué, plié, repoussé, résumé, risqué, sauté, roué, séance, naïveté and touché. 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 , 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, the Maldivian capital Malé, saké from Japanese sake, and Pokémon from the Japanese compound for pocket monster, the last three from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, and where transcriptions do not normally use acute accents.

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 and ancien régime.

The acute accent is sometimes (though rarely) used for poetic purposes:

The layout of some European PC keyboards, combined with problematic keyboard-driver semantics, causes some users to use an acute accent or a grave accent instead of an apostrophe when typing in English (e.g. typing or instead of John's).[13]

Typographic form

Western typographic and calligraphic traditions generally design the acute accent as going from top to bottom. French even has the definition of acute is the accent French: «qui va de droite à gauche» (English: "which goes from right to left"), meaning that it descends from top right to lower left.

In Polish, the Polish: kreska diacritic is used instead, which usually has a different shape and style compared to other European languages. It features a more vertical steep form and is moved more to the right side of center line than acute. As Unicode does not differentiate the Polish: kreska from acute, letters from Western (computer) fonts and Polish fonts had to share the same set of code points, which make designing the conflicting character (i.e. o acute, (ó)) more troublesome. OpenType tried to solve this problem by giving language-sensitive glyph substitution to designers such that the font would automatically switch between Western (ó) and Polish (ó) based on language settings. New computer fonts are sensitive to this issue and their design for the diacritics tends toward a more "universal design" so that there will be less need for localization, for example Roboto and Noto typefaces.[14]

Pinyin uses the acute accent to mark the second tone (rising or high-rising tone), which indicates a tone rising from low to high, causing the writing stroke of acute accent to go from lower left to top right. This contradicts the Western typographic tradition which makes designing the acute accent in Chinese typefaces a problem. Designers approach this problem in 3 ways: either keep the original Western form of going top right (thicker) to bottom left (thinner) (e.g. Arial/Times New Roman), flip the stroke to go from bottom left (thicker) to top right (thinner) (e.g. Adobe HeiTi Std/SimSun), or just make the accents without stroke variation (e.g. SimHei).[15]

Unicode

Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with acute accent" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using the combining character facility (and) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real-world application and are not shown in the table.

Technical encoding

Microsoft Windows

On Windows computers with US keyboard mapping, 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.[16] The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding) are:

On most non-US keyboard layouts (e.g. Spanish, Hiberno-English), these letters can also be made by holding AltGr (or Ctrl+Alt with US international mapping) and the desired letter. Individual applications may have enhanced support for accents.

macOS

On macOS computers, an acute accent is placed on a vowel by pressing and then the vowel, which can also be capitalised; for example, á is formed by pressing and then, and Á is formed by pressing and then .

Keyboards

See main article: List of QWERTY keyboard language variants. Because keyboards have only a limited number of keys, US English keyboards do not have keys for accented characters. 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. The US-International layout provides this function: is a dead key so appears to have no effect until the next key is pressed, when it adds the desired accute accent.

Computers sold in Europe (including UK) have an ('alternate graphic') key which adds a third and (with the Shift key) fourth effect to most keys. Thus produces and produces .

Notes and References

  1. https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/síneadh Síneadh dictionary entry
  2. Web site: Ide | svenska.se .
  3. Web site: Letter Database. eki.ee.
  4. http://www.his.com/~rory/orthocrit.html
  5. Web site: Am Faclair Beag - Scottish Gaelic Dictionary. www.faclair.com.
  6. News: Anger over spelling of Irish names on transport passes: Irish transport authority blames 'technical limitation' for lack of fadas on Leap cards. The Guardian. 21 January 2019. 21 January 2019. Rory. Carroll.
  7. Web site: Polish Diacritics: how to?. www.twardoch.com.
  8. http://sprakradet.no/Raad/Skriveregler_og_grammatikk/Aksentteikn/ Norwegian language council, Diacritics (in Norwegian)
  9. This makes "¿Cómo como? Como como como." correct sentences (How I eat? I eat like I eat.)
  10. [Larry Trask|Trask, L.]
  11. Lecciones de ortografía del euskera bizkaino, page 40, Arana eta Goiri'tar Sabin, Bilbao, Bizkaya'ren Edestija ta Izkerea Pizkundia, 1896 (Sebastián de Amorrortu).
  12. Book: Svonni , E Mikael . Sámegiel-ruoŧagiel skuvlasátnelistu . Sámiskuvlastivra . 1984 . III . 91-7716-008-8 . true.
  13. Web site: Apostrophe and acute accent confusion. Kuhn. Markus. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. 7 May 2001. 4 June 2012.
  14. Web site: Add Polish letterforms · Issue #981 · googlefonts/noto-fonts. 2020-06-16. GitHub. en.
  15. Web site: The Type — Wǒ ài pīnyīn!. 2020-06-14. The Type.
  16. Web site: Crystel . Ana . 2010-03-15 . SOTAVENTO-PEDAGOGÍA: USO Y DESUSO DE LOS ACENTOS: . 2024-02-29 . SOTAVENTO-PEDAGOGÍA.