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Information about Grave Accent

Àà
Èè
Ìì
Ǹǹ
Òò
Ùù
??
??


Diacritical marks
accent
acute accent ( )
double acute accent ( ˝ )
grave accent ( ` )
double grave accent (  ̏ )
breve ( ˘ )
caron / hček ( ˇ )
cedilla ( )
circumflex ( ^ )
diaeresis / umlaut ( )
dot ( )
anunaasika ( ˙ )
anusvara (  ̣ )
chandrabindu (   ँ   ঁ   ઁ   ଁ ఁ )
hook / dấu hỏi (  ̉ )
horn / dấu mc (  ̛ )
macron ( )
ogonek ( ˛ )
ring / kroužek ( ˚, ˳ )
rough breathing / spiritus asper (  ῾ )
smooth breathing / spiritus lenis (  ᾿ )
Marks sometimes used as diacritics
apostrophe ( ’ )
bar ( | )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
hyphen ( ˗ )
tilde ( ~ )
titlo (  ҃ )


The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritical mark used in written Catalan, French, Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), Italian, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, and other languages.

The word grave is derived from the Latin gravis (heavy). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv", IPA /ɡɹɑːv/, not like grave meaning "serious" or a "tomb." It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly: accent grave /aksɑ̃ ɡʁav/.

Pitch

The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high pitch (indicated by an acute accent) was lowered because of a following word in the same sentence. Since Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, this diacritic has been replaced with an acute accent mark in the modern monotonic orthography.

Stress

The grave accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in Catalan and Italian. Some examples from Italian are città "city", morì "[he/she] died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò "[he/she] brought, carried". Especially with capital letters, or when using a keyboard without accented letters, an apostrophe is sometimes used instead of it in Italian, thus E’ instead of È "[he/she/it] is", though this is considered (at least) inelegant and inaccurate (exception: the phrase un po’ "a little" is never spelt un pò).

In Italian there are pairs of words, one accented and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning, such as pero "pear tree" and però "but".

In Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk), the grave accent is used to indicate stress on a syllable that would otherwise be unstressed. Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, does not respect these rules much, and there is a certain interchangeability with the acute accent.

Height

The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Romance languages:

Disambiguation

The grave accent is used to distinguish homophones in several languages:
  • Catalan, where it distinguishes, for example, ma "my" from mà "hand".
  • French. The grave accent on the letters a and u has no effect on pronunciation and only serves to distinguish homonyms that are otherwise spelled the same. It distinguishes the preposition à "to" and the verb a (present tense of avoir), as well as the adverb là "there" and the feminine definite article la; it is also used in the word déjà and the phrase çà et là ("hither and thither"; without the accent, it would literally mean "it and the"). It is used on the letter u only to distinguish où "where" and ou "or". In those French comic books which are hand-lettered all in capitals, the symbol is very short atop the E or U, but slides down on the right of the A, though not descending past the cross-bar.
  • Italian, where it distinguishes for example the conjunction e "and" from the verb è "he/she/it is", or the female article la from the adverb là "there". Another common disambiguation occurs in a very large number of Italian verbs: mangio means "I eat" while mangiò means "he/she ate"; porto means "I carry" while portò means "he/she carried". Adding the accent shifts the meaning of such verbs from the first person present to the third person past. It is only used at the end of a word.
  • Norwegian, where it differentiates between certain words, such as og "and" and òg "also".

Length

In Welsh, the accent is used to denote a short vowel sound in a word which would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound, for example mẁg "mug" versus mwg "smoke".

In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel (the use of both é and ó in addition to è and ò is now discouraged, and only the grave accent is used).

Tone

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone.

In African languages, the grave accent is often used to indicate a low tone, e.g. Nobiin jàkkàr 'fish-hook', Yoruba àgbọ̀n 'chin', Hausa màcè 'woman'.

Other uses

In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis). For example, instead of a aquela hora, one says and writes àquela hora "at that hour".

Use in English

The grave accent is used in English only in poetry and song lyrics. It indicates that a vowel usually silent is to be pronounced, in order to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word ending with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /lʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced /ˈlʊkɪd/ (look-ed). It can also be used in this capacity to distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /lɜː(r)nd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜː(r)nɪd/.

Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, vis-à-vis, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée.

Computer-related

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters à, è, ì, ò, ù, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the grave accent are available in Unicode.

In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character, encoded as 768, hex 300. Outside the U.S. character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many older UK computers, such as the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, have the £ symbol as character 96.

On many computer keyboards, the grave accent occupies a key by itself, and is meant to be combined with vowels as a multi-key combination. However, programmers have used the key by itself for a number of tasks.

On a Mac, to get a character, such as à, the user must type Option-` and then the vowel. For example, to make à, the user must type Option-` and then 'a', and to make À, the user must type Option-` and then Shift-a.

In many PC based computer games, the grave accent key is often used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.

When using TeX to typeset text, the grave accent on its own is used in lieu of a dedicated open-quote key. For example, ` becomes a single opening quote (‘) and `` becomes a double opening quote (“). Compared to algorithmic ‘quote education’ available in modern word processors, this method has the advantage of it becoming completely unambiguous (consider ‘the ’60s’ or the archaic ‘’twas’ – most modern word processors would incorrectly render these as ‘the ‘60s’ and ‘‘twas’, respectively). The primary disadvantage is that it requires the user to adjust to this style.

Many of the UNIX shells and the programming languages Perl and PHP use pairs of this character—known as backquote or backtick—to indicate substitution of the standard output from one command into a line of text defining another command. For example, echo `uname -a` would execute echo [output of "uname -a"].

In Lisp macro systems, the backquote character (called quasiquote in Scheme) introduces a quoted expression in which comma-substitution may occur. It is identical to the plain quote, except that symbols prefixed with a comma will be replaced with those symbols' values as variables. This is roughly analogous to the Unix shell's variable interpolation with $ inside double quotes.

In MySQL, it is used in queries as a table and database classifier.

In the Python programming language, "backticks" are used as a synonym for the repr() function, which converts its argument to a string suitable for a programmer to view. However, this feature has been removed in the upcoming Python 3000. Backticks are also used extensively in the reStructuredText plain text markup language (implemented in the Python docutils package).

In Pico, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.

In Verilog the grave accent is used to define constants (e.g. after the line `define NUM 100, `NUM can be used as a synonym for 100) whereas the apostrophe is used in specifying sized constants (for example, 5'd10 is a 5-bit constant with the value 10). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent and vice versa is a frequent beginner mistakes in the language.

In Unlambda, the backquote character denotes function application.

See also

External links

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
Z
Letters using grave sign
ǸǹẀẁỲỳ
A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words.
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double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. Consequently, it is also known as Hungarumlaut.[1] The signs formed with diacritic marks count as letters of their own right in the Hungarian alphabet.
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The double grave accent is a diacritic used in scholarly discussions of the Serbo-Croatian language complex and sometimes Slovenian. It is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
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The circumflex (ˆ) (often also called a "caret", from a non-diacritical sign with similar shape (^); also "hat" or "uppen") is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Frisian, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Romanized Japanese, Welsh,
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dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct ( · ), or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' (  ̇ ) and 'combining dot below' (  ̣
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This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject.
Please help recruit one or [ improve this article] yourself. See the talk page for details.
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Anusvara (Dev: अनुस्वार anusvāra
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Chandrabindu (meaning "moon-dot" in Sanskrit, alternatively spelled candrabindu, chandravindu, candravindu, or chôndrobindu) is a diacritic sign having the form of a dot inside the lower half of a circle.
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For other meanings of hook, see hook.


Diacritical marks
accent
acute accent ( )
double acute accent ( ˝ )
grave accent ( ` )

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horn (Vietnamese dấu móc) is a diacritic mark attached to the top right corner of the letters o and u in the Vietnamese alphabet to give ơ and ư, unrounded variants of the vowel represented by the basic letter.
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ogonek (Polish for "little tail", the diminutive of ogon) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.
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The spiritus asper ("rough breathing"), dasy pneuma (Greek: dasy, δασύ) or dasia (Greek: δασεῖα), is a diacritical mark used in Polytonic orthography.
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“᾿” redirects here. For the similar character ᾿, see Ejective consonant.


The spiritus lenis ("smooth breathing" or "soft breathing"), psilon pneuma (Greek: psilón, ψιλόν
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apostrophe ( ’  or  ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages written in the Latin alphabet.
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bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others.
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colon (“:”) is a punctuation mark, consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.

Punctuation

Usage

As with many other punctuation marks, the usage of colon varies among languages and, for a given language, among
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For other uses, see Comma.
A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text.
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hyphen ( ‐ ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with the dashes ( –, —, ― ), which are longer and have different functions.
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tilde (~) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning a title or superscription, and is pronounced [ˈtɪldə]
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Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol first used in old Cyrillic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the Greek "τίτλος", "title".
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A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words.
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In Spain: Catalonia, Valencian Community, Balearic Islands, Aragon (in La Franja), Murcia (in El Carxe). In France: Northern Catalonia. In Italy: The city of L'Alguer. In Andorra.
Total speakers: 9.
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French (français, pronounced [fʁɑ̃ˈsɛ]) is a Romance language originally spoken in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, and today by about 300 million people around the world as either
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