Acute accent: Encyclopedia - Acute accent

Acute accent

accent

breve ( ˘ )
caron / háček ( ˇ )
cedilla ( ¸ )
circumflex ( ˆ )
diaeresis ( ¨ )
dot ( · )

hook / dấu hỏi (  ̉ )
macron ( ˉ )
ogonek ( ˛ )
ring / kroužek ( ˚ )
spiritus asper ( ʽ )
spiritus lenis (  ʼ )
umlaut ( ¨ )

apostrophe ( ’ )
bar ( | )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
hyphen ( ˗ )
tilde ( ˜ )
titlo (  ҃ )

The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. The word acute is derived from the Latin acutus ("sharp"), itself a loan translation of the Greek ὀξύς (oxýs).

Acute accent - Openness

In French the acute accent is used only on the letter e, where it changes the vowel sound. The mark is known as "accent aigu" and distinguishes é [e], and e [ə]. This distinction did not exist in Old French. In Italian, it makes an e be pronounced as [e], in a position it would normally be pronounced as [ɛ]; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish).

In Catalan, the acute accent is used to mark both the stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as è [ɛ] versus é [e], or such as ò [ɔ] versus ó [o]. Letters i and u may take the acute accent as well, but not the grave one.

In Portuguese, the acute accent marks the stress and quality of the open-mid vowels é [ɛ] and ó [ɔ]. The corresponding stressed close-mid vowels are indicated with a circumflex accent.

In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician, the acute accent is used to mark the stressed vowel of a written word that would normally be stressed on another syllable. Stress is contrastive in those languages. For example, in Spanish ánimo ["a-ni-mo] ("mood, spirit"), animo [a-"ni-mo] ("I cheer"), and animó [a-ni-"mo] ("he cheered") are three different words.

In Welsh words the stress is always given on the penultimate syllable unless indicated otherwise by the use of an acute accent on the stressed vowel; this can be on an a, e, i, o, u, w, or y.

In Spanish and Dutch, the acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. In Spanish, this covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo (interrogative how) & como (non-interrogative how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the); in Dutch, this is mainly één (one) & een (a/an).

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, "Het is ónze auto, niet die van jullie." ("This is our car, not yours.") In this example, "ónze" is merely an emphasized form of "onze".

In Danish, the usage of the acute accent is very similar to the Dutch usage, for example én (one) vs. en (a/an) and fór (went) and for (for). It 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".

In Norwegian, the acute accent is similar to Danish. In Norwegian bokmål, it is also used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere, which lose their final e and might look like plurals (most often ending in -er) of some noun: kontrollér is the imperative form of "to control", kontroller is the noun "controls". The simple past of the (disused) verb å fare, "to travel", is fór, to distinguish it from for ("for" as in English). Many words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as allé, kafé, idé, komité, diskré. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, and there exists a certain degree of interchangeability with the grave accent.

In Greek it is nowadays always used on the stressed syllable of a word. In Ancient Greek it more specifically indicated a syllable with a high tone, the grave accent and circumflex being used in other cases, but this distinction has disappeared in the modern language.

In Swedish, the acute accent 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 resumé ("resumé", noun). There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: armé ("army") versus arme ("poor; pitiful", masculine declination) and idé ("idea") versus ide ("winter quarters").

Acute accent - Length

In Hungarian, Irish, Czech, and Slovak the acute accent is used to mark the quantity or length of the base vowel. This is the same contrast that differentiated long and short vowels in classical Latin, or that nowadays differentiate simple and double vowels in written Finnish. In Czech and Slovak a vowel marked with an accent is called a "long vowel"; it does not have the same meaning as a "long vowel" in English. In Czech, the letter u can have an acute accent only at the beginning of a word or a word stem (after a prefix). To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring) is used instead, to form ů. In Slovak, there are two more "long vowels" (which are consonants in the alphabet, but vowels in terms of their function) : ŕ and ĺ, which are pronounced just like ordinary syllabic r and l, only longer.

The use of the acute (see also háček) to denote long pronunciation of Latin characters was introduced by Jan Hus in the 15th century into the Czech language and today it is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, Icelanders and partly by the Poles, although in many of these languages it has other function than marking the long vowels. It is also often used for international transliteration.

Acute accent - Palatalization

In Polish, the acute accent is used over several letters - four consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate palatalization, rather as the háček is used in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg. sześć /ʃɛɕʨ/ (six) However, the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute. Over the vowel "ó" it indicates pronunciation change into [u] and historically was a sign of openness, much like in modern French.

In Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized "t" sound.

Acute accent - Other uses

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone. In others, especially African languages, it is used to indicate a high tone.

In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a síneadh fada (/ˌʃiːnʲa ˈfadˠə/), is a sign of lenition and denotes a long vowel as opposed to a short one.

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 /su/, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value /su/.

In Faroese, the acute accent is used on 5 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 [ɔa], short [ɔ] and before [a]: [õ]
• í/ý: long [ʊiː], short [ʊi]
• ó: long [ɔu], [ɛu] or [œu], short: [œ], except Suðuroy: [ɔ]
  • When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɛ], except in Suðuroy where it is [ɔ]
• ú: long [æa], short [ʏ]
  • When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɪ]

In 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: [au(ː)]
• é: long [jeɛː], short [jɛ]
• í/ý: [i(ː)]
• ó: [ou(ː)]
• ú: [u(ː)]

All can be either short or long, but note that the pronunciation of é is not the same short and long.

In Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: [j]

Acute accent - 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 sauté, roué, café, touché, fiancé, and fiancée. 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 resumé, with only one accent.

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, adiós, coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée.

Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation. (For example, spelling winged (wing'd) as wingèd to indicate that it should be pronounced (wing-ed). The grave accent is also sometimes used for this purpose.

Acute accent - Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 and extended ASCII 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. Unicode also provides the acute accent as a combining character, U+0301.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Acute accent", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki