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Acute accent

} "six"). However, in contrast to the ''háček'' which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the ''kreska'' denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the ''kreska'' is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center.Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Lacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance. In Bosnian language|Bosnian, Croatian language|Croatian and Serbian language|Serbian the letter ''ć'' is used to represent a palatalized ''t''. In the romanization of Macedonian language|Macedonian, ''ǵ'' and ''ḱ'' represent the Cyrillic alphabet|Cyrillic letters Gje|Ѓ and Kje|Ќ, which stand for palatal consonant|palatal or alveolo-palatal consonant|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 language|Proto-Indo-European phonemes and .

Tone

In some tonal languages written with the Latin alphabet, such as Vietnamese language|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 (linguistics)|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 language|Yoruba ''apá'' 'arm', Nobiin language|Nobiin ''féntí'' 'sweet date', Ekoti language|Ekoti ''kaláwa'' 'boat', Navajo language|Navajo ''t’áá'' 'just'.

Disambiguation

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:
- Danish language|Danish. Examples: ''én'' "one" vs. ''en'' "a/an"; ''fór'' "went" vs. ''for'' "for"; ''véd'' "know(s)" vs. ''ved'' "by"; ''gǿr'' "bark(s)" vs. ''gør'' "do(es)"; ''dǿr'' "die(s)" vs. ''dør'' "door"; ''allé'' "alley" vs. ''alle'' "everybody".
Furthermore, it is also used for the imperative form of verbs ending in ''-ere'', which lose their final ''e'' and might be mistaken for plurals of a noun (which most often end in ''-er''): ''analysér'' is the imperative form of ''at analysere'' "to analyse", ''analyser'' is "analyses", plural of the noun ''analyse'' "analysis". Using an acute accent is always optional, never required.
- Modern Greek language|Modern Greek. Although all polysyllabic words have an acute accent on the stressed syllable, in monosyllabic words the presence or absence of an accent may disambiguate. The most common case is ''η'', the feminine definite article ("the"), versus ''ή'', meaning "or".
- Norwegian language|Norwegian. It is used to indicate stress on a vowel otherwise not expected to have stress. Most words are stressed on the first syllable and diacritical marks are rarely used. An example is the imperative form of verbs ending in ''-ere'' as it is in Danish: ''kontrollér'' is the imperative form of "to control", ''kontroller'' is the noun "controls". The use is, however, inconsistent. In Nynorsk, the simple past of the verb ''å fare'', "to travel", can optionally be written ''fór'', to distinguish it from ''for'' (preposition "for" as in English), ''fôr'' "feed" ''n.''/"lining", or ''fòr'' "narrow ditch, trail by plow'' (all the diacritics in these examples are optionalNorwegian language council, Diacritics (in Norwegian)).
- Spanish language|Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic, such as ''cómo'' (interrogative "how") and ''como'' (non-interrogative "how", comparative "like", "I eat"), differentiates ''qué'' (what) from ''que'' (that), ''dónde'' and ''donde'' "where", and some other words such as ''tú'' "you" and ''tu'' "your," ''té'' "tea" and ''te'' "you" (direct/indirect object), ''él'' "he/him" and ''el'' ("the", masculine). This usage of the acute accent is called ''acento diacrítico''.

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''. Also in family names like Piét, Piél, Plusjé, Hofsté. In Danish language|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

- In Faroese language|Faroese, the acute accent is used on five of the vowels (a, i, o, u and y), but these letters, á, í, ó, ú and ý are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.
- á: long , short and before :
- í/ý: long , short
- ó: long , or , short: , except Suðuroy:
- : When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced , except in Suðuroy where it is
- ú: long , short
- : When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced
- In Hungarian language|Hungarian, the acute accent marks a difference in quality on two vowels, apart from vowel length:
- The (short) vowel ''a'' is Open back rounded vowel|open back rounded (ɒ), but ''á'' is Open front unrounded vowel|open front unrounded (a) (and long).
- Similarly, the (short) vowel ''e'' is Open-mid front unrounded vowel|open-mid front unrounded (ɛ), while (long) ''é'' is Close-mid front unrounded vowel|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.
- In Icelandic language|Icelandic the acute accent is used on 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, as in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.
- á:
- é: long , short
- í/ý:
- ó:
- ú:
- 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.
- In Polish language|Polish, the acute on "ó" indicates a pronunciation change into , and historically it was used to indicate a long vowel.
- In Turkmen language|Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: j.

Other uses

- Many Norwegian language|Norwegian words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as ''allé'', ''kafé'', ''idé'', ''komité''. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, or results in the grave accent, erroneously being used in its place. Likewise, in Swedish language|Swedish, the acute accent is used only for the letter ''e'', mostly in words of French origin and in some names. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel quantity as well as quality and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include ''café'' ("café") and ''résumé'' ("resumé", noun). There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: ''armé'' ("army") versus ''arme'' ("poor; pitiful", masculine gender) and ''idé'' ("idea") versus ''ide'' ("winter quarters").
- In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin alphabet|Latin letter to represent the letters peculiar to this language (''Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž'') when typing when there was no way of entering these letters correctly otherwise.
- In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform script|Cuneiform, an acute accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the second representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus ''su'' is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value /su/, while ''sú'' transliterates the second sign with the value /su/.
- In some Basque language|Basque texts, the letters '''r''' and '''l''' carry acute accents, which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, '''''ŕ''''' is used to represent '''''rr''''' (a trilled r, this spelling is used only internally in words, to differentiate between -'''''r'''''-, an alveolar tap–in Basque /r/ in word-initial and word-final positions is always trilled) and '''''ĺ''''' for '''''ll''''' (a palatalized /l/).

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 ''café'', ''fiancé'', ''fiancée'', ''passé'', ''roué'', ''sauté'', and ''touché''. Retention of the accent is common only in the French language|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 e|silent, for example, ''maté'' from Spanish ''mate,'' ''saké,'' and the Maldivian capital ''Malé,'' the last two 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, Italic type|italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, ''coup d'état'', ''pièce de résistance'', ''crème brûlée'' and ''ancien régime''. Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation: for example, spelling the word ''picked'' (normally ) as ''pickéd'' to indicate the pronunciation . The grave accent is more usually 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 majuscule|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. The codes (which come from the Code page 437|IBM PC encoding) are:
- 160 for á
- 130 for é
- 161 for í
- 162 for ó
- 163 for ú 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 Alta Vista automatic translatorBabelfish 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.

Notes

External links

- Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
- Keyboard Help — Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer Category:Alphabetic diacritics

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