Grave accent
The
grave accent (
` ) is a
diacritic mark used in written
Greek until
1982 (
polytonic orthography),
French,
Catalan,
Welsh,
Italian,
Vietnamese,
Scottish Gaelic,
Norwegian,
Portuguese and other languages.
The word
grave is derived from the
Latin gravis (heavy), itself a translation of the Greek
barys (βαρύς). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv" (IPA ), not like
grave meaning serious or a tomb. It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly:
accent grave ()).
à À è È ì Ì ò ' ù Ù
The grave accent marks the
height or openness of the vowels
e and
o in several
Romance languages. In
French,
Italian and
Catalan, it indicates that these vowels are
open.
In
Catalan, the grave accent (or
accent obert as it's called in this language) is used to mark both the
stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as
è versus
é , or such as
ò versus
ó . The letter
a is the only one that takes the grave accent but not the acute, while
i and
u can only take the acute (
accent tancat in Catalan).
In
French, the grave accent has two uses. On the letter
e it marks the distinct quality of the vowel:
è , and
e . On the letters
a and
u it has no effect on pronunciation and only serves to distinguish homonyms that are otherwise spelled the same. 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, not descending past the cross-bar, though.
The grave accent marks the
stressed vowel of a word in
Italian and
Catalan.
In
Italian, it marks final
stress, as in
virtù ("virtue") or
città ("city") or as in
è ("it is"). When the accented character is unavailable, an
apostrophe is used instead; this is particularly evident with the capitalised form
È, a common beginning for a sentence yet absent from Italian
keyboard layouts, which is almost always replaced with
E'.
In
Norwegian (both
bokmål and
Nynorsk), the grave accent is used to indicate stress on a syllable that would otherwise be unstressed. This also differentiates between certain words, e.g.
og ("and") and
òg ("also"). Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, does not respect these rules much, and there is a certain interchangeability with the
acute accent.
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 ("a mug") versus
mwg ("smoke").
In
Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel.
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'.
The grave accent is used to distinguish
homophones in
French,
Italian and
Catalan.
In
French, the grave accent on the letters
a and
u it 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 "that and the"). It is used on the letter
u only to distinguish
où ("where") and
ou ("or").
In
Catalan, it is used sometimes to distinguish words with different meanings but the same pronunciation (
homophones): compare
ma (my) and
mà (hand).
In
Greek the grave accent occurs only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high
pitch (indicated by an
acute accent) was lowered in Ancient Greek because of a following word in the same sentence. It is used in the traditional
polytonic orthography, but the
monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.
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".
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 as a single syllable, with the
e silent; when written as
lookèd, the
e is pronounced
"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, from the
adjective learnèd.
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.
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. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character.
In the
ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Outside the U.S. character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many much older UK computers 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.
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 language Perl 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.
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 and
PHP, it is used in queries as a table and database classifier.
In
Pico, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.
In
Verilog the grave accent is used to help define a size constant (for example, 2`b01). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent is one of the top five beginner mistakes in the language.
In
Unlambda, the backquote character denotes function application.
*
Diacritics Project " All you need to design a font with correct accents*
ASCII and Unicode quotation marks " "Please do not use the ASCII grave accent as a left quotation mark"
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Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer
