An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.
Pitch
Ancient Greek
Шаблон:See also
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 Шаблон:Wikt-lang (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as Шаблон:Wikt-lang "sharpened".
Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word, for example, soyópokistsi (Шаблон:Trans).
Bulgarian: 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.
Dutch uses it to mark stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur and prevent respectively) or a more closed vowel (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh) if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a(n)".
Irish uses the accent, called a Шаблон:Lang in Irish, to indicate a long vowel. It is commonly referred to simply as a Шаблон:Lang.[1]
Italian The accent is used to indicate the stress in a word, or whether the vowel is "open" or "wide", or "closed", or "narrow". For example, pèscaШаблон:IPA-it "peach" ("open" or "wide" vowel, as in "pen") and péscaШаблон:IPA-it "fishing" ("closed" or "narrow" vowel, as in "pain"). However, these two words are usually pronounced the same way, which varies with region.
Lakota. For example, kákhi "in that direction" but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
Leonese uses it for marking stress or disambiguation.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish use the acute accent to indicate that a terminal syllable with the e is stressed and is often omitted if it does not change the meaning: armen (first syllable stressed) means "the arm" while armé(e)n means "the army"; ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's den"(only in Swedish)[2] while idé means "idea". Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét (the indefinite article and the word "one" in Danish and Norwegian). In Norwegian, however, the neuter word "one" is spelled ett. Then, the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object, which derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish kafé and Danish café (also cafe).
Spanish marks stressed syllables in polysyllabic words that deviate from the standardized stress patterns. In monosyllabic words, it is used to distinguish homophones, e.g.: el (the) and él (he).
Bislama. One of the two orthographies distinguishes éШаблон:IPA from eШаблон:IPA.[3] The orthography after 1995 does not distinguish these sounds, and has no diacritics.
French. The acute is used on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes éШаблон:IPA from èШаблон:IPA, êШаблон:IPA, and eШаблон:IPA. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
Italian. The acute accent (sometimes called accento chiuso, "closed accent" in Italian) is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel (and a few other words). Words ending in stressed -o are never marked with an acute accent (ó), but with a grave accent (ò). Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché ("why/because"); in the conjugated copulaè ("is"); in ambiguous monosyllables such as né ('neither') vs.ne ('of it') and sé ('itself') vs.se ('if'); and some verb forms, e.g.poté ("he/she/it could" (past tense)). The symbol ó can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between bótte ("barrel") and bòtte ("beating"), though this is not mandatory: in fact standard Italian keyboards lack a dedicated ó key.
Scottish Gaelic (a Celtic rather than Romance language) uses/used a system in which éШаблон:IPA is contrasted with èШаблон:IPA and óШаблон:IPA with òШаблон:IPA. Both the grave and acute indicate length; é/è and ó/ò are thus contrasted with eШаблон:IPA and oШаблон:IPA respectively. Besides, á appears in the words áШаблон:IPA, ámШаблон:IPA and ásШаблон:IPA in order to distinguish them from aШаблон:IPA, amШаблон:IPA and asШаблон:IPA respectively.[4][5] The other vowels (i and u) only appear either without an accent or with a grave. Since the 1980s the SQA (which sets school standards and thus the de facto standard language) and most publishers have abandoned the acute accent, using grave accents in all situations (analogous to the use of the acute in Irish). However, universities, some publishers and many speakers continue to use acute accents.
To mark low vowels:
Portuguese. The vowels áШаблон:IPAslink, éШаблон:IPAslink and óШаблон:IPAslink are stressed low vowels, in opposition to âШаблон:IPAslink, êШаблон:IPAslink and ôШаблон:IPAslink which are stressed high vowels. However, the accent is only used in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word: where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, no accent is used, and the height of the stressed vowel cannot then usually be determined solely from the word's spelling.
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 Шаблон:Lang ("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 Шаблон:Lang in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. Шаблон:LangШаблон:IPA-pl "six"). However, in contrast to the Шаблон:Lang which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the Шаблон:Lang denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the Шаблон:Lang is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center.[7] A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Шаблон:Lang. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.
In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyinromanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofosemi-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.
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:
Catalan. Examples: són "they are" vs. son "tiredness", més "more" vs. mes "month".
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.
Dutch. Examples: één "one" vs. een "a/an"; vóór "before" vs. voor "for"; vóórkomen "to exist/to happen" vs. voorkómen "to prevent/to avoid". Using an acute accent is mostly optional.
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 Шаблон:Char, the feminine definite article ("the"), versus Шаблон:Char, meaning "or". Other cases include Шаблон:Lang ("who"/"which") versus Шаблон:Lang ("where") and Шаблон:Lang ("that", as in "he told me that...") versus Шаблон:Lang ("how").
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. Although incorrect, it is frequently used to mark 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 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 (only in Nynorsk) "narrow ditch, trail by plow" (all the diacritics in these examples are optional.[8])
Russian. Acute accents (technically, stress marks) are used in dictionaries to indicate the stressed syllable. They may also be optionally used to disambiguate both between minimal pairs, such as за́мок (read as zámak, means "castle") and замо́к (read as zamók, means "lock"), and between question words and relative pronouns such as что ("what", stressed, or "that", unstressed), similarly to Spanish. This is rare, however, as usually meaning is determined by context and no stress mark is written. The same rules apply to Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian and Bulgarian.
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"[9]), differentiates qué (what) from que (that), 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 tilde diacrítica.
Emphasis
In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der (there), as in 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".
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. The IJ digraph can be stressed with íj́ but is usually stressed as íj for technical reasons.
In the Armenian script emphasis on a word is marked by an acute accent above the word's stressed vowel; it is traditionally grouped with the Armenian question and exclamation marks which are also diacritics applied to the stressed vowel.
Letter extension
In 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.
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.
In Icelandic the acute accent is used on all 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, like in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.Файл:Icelandic Text Extract.jpgA sample extract of Icelandic.
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.
In transliterating texts written in 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 Шаблон:IPA, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value Шаблон:IPA.Шаблон:Clarify
In Emilian, é ó denote both length and height, representing [e, o].
In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding 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.[12]
Many 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, the acute accent is used only for the letter Шаблон:Angbr, 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 resumé ("résumé", 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 Romagnol, é ó denote both length and height, representing [eː, oː].
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, toupée 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 Шаблон:Sic, 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:
It can mark stress on an unusual syllable: for example, caléndar to indicate Шаблон:IPA (rather than the standard Шаблон:IPA).
It can disambiguate stress where the distinction is metrically important: for example, rébel (as opposed to rebél), or áll trádes, to show that the phrase is pronounced as a spondee, rather than the more natural iamb.
It can indicate the sounding of an ordinarily silent letter: for example, pickéd to indicate the pronunciation Шаблон:IPA, rather than standard Шаблон:IPA (the grave accent is more common for this last purpose).
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 Шаблон:As written or Шаблон:As written instead of John's).[13]
Typographic form
Acute accent in multiple fonts.Acute accent in multiple fonts. Gray letters indicate o kreska in the provided font. Notice that kreska in gray letters are steeper than acute accent in black letters. Also in Adobe HeiTi Std and SimSun, the stroke goes from bottom-left (thicker) to top-right (thinner), showing the rising nature of the tone; however, the acute accent in SimHei is made without variation in thickness.
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 Шаблон:Lang (Шаблон:Lang-en),[14] meaning that it descends from top right to lower left.
In Polish, Шаблон:Lang is instead used which usually has a different shape and style compared to other Western languages. It features a more vertical steep form and is moved more to the right side of center line than acute. As Unicode did not differentiate the Шаблон:Lang from acute, letters from Western font and Polish font had to share the same set of characters which make designing the conflicting character (i.e. o acute, Шаблон:Angbr) more troublesome. OpenType tried to solve this problem by giving language-sensitive glyph substitution to designers so that the font will automatically switch between Western Шаблон:Angbr and Polish Шаблон:Angbr based on language settings.[7] New 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.[15]
Pinyin uses the acute accent to mark the second tone (rising or high-rising tone), which indicate 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 fonts 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).[16]
The ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 character encodings 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.
Шаблон:More
Microsoft Windows
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.[17] The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding) are:
160 for á
130 for é
161 for í
162 for ó
163 for ú
On most non-US keyboard layouts (e.g. Hiberno-English), these letters can also be made by holding AltGr (or Ctrl+Alt) and the desired letter. Individual applications may have enhanced support for accents.
Шаблон:Main
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: Шаблон:Keypress is a dead key so appears to have no effect until the next key is pressed, when it adds the desired accute accent.
↑Lecciones de ortografía del euskera bizkaino, page 40, Arana eta Goiri'tar Sabin, Bilbao, Bizkaya'ren Edestija ta Izkerea Pizkundia, 1896 (Sebastián de Amorrortu).
