Acute accent Details, Meaning Acute accent Article and Explanation Guide

Acute accent Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Vietnamese, Dutch, Irish Gaelic and other languages.

Table of contents

1 Openess
2 Stress or disambiguation
3 Openess or disambiguation
4 Length
5 Palatalization
6 Other uses
7 Use in English
8 Technical notes
9 See also

Openess

In French and Italian, the acute accent is used only on the letter e, where it changes the vowel sound.

In French, it changes é [e], and e [@]. In Italian, it makes an é be pronounced as [e], in a position it would normally be pronounced as [E]; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish).

Stress or disambiguation

In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Greek, 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. E.g., 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.

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

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence.

Openess or disambiguation

In Swedish, the acute accent is also used only on the letter e, mostly in words of French origin and in some names, and mostly on the last syllable of a word. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel sound, same as in French, and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include resumé (accent on the last e only!) and Linné (the title taken by Carolus Linnaeus when he was knighted). It is otherwise used in rare cases to show the accent of foreign and transcribed words (such as advéniat, svobóda).

Length

In Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Icelandic 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 diferentiate 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, Croatians, Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, Icelandians 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.

Palatalization

In Polish, the acute accent is used over several letters - consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate palatalization, a bit like the háček; is used in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg. sześć [sheshch] (six)(though the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute). Over the vowel "ó" it indicates pronunciation change into /u/.

Other uses

In Vietnamese and some other tonal languages, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone.

In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a síneadh fada (pronounced SHEE-na FA-da), 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 šu is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value /šu/, while šú transliterates the second sign with the value /šu/.

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 /Oa/, short /O/ and before /a/: /o~/
í/ý: long /Ui:/, short /Ui/
ó: long /Ou/, /Eu/ or /9u/, short: /9/, except Suđuroy: /O/
ú: long /}u/, short /Y/

Use in English

A number of English words are written with the acute accent, mainly those borrowed from French. Such words include resumé, fiancé and fiancée, sauté, roué café, and touché. The accent is commonly only retained where the word as spelled would tend to be pronounced differently if the accent were not there.

Technical notes

Using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, one can type the letters á, é, í, ó, ú, and ý. Dozens more letters with the acute accent are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the acute accent as a combining character.