Grave accent

The grave accent ( ` ) (/ɡreɪv/ or /ɡrɑːv/) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in English, French, Dutch, Italian, andmany other western European languages. It is also used in other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Mohawk and Yoruba, and with non-Latin writing systems such as the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and the Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao semi-syllabary. It has no single meaning, but can indicate pitch, stress, or other features. The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography. The accent mark was called βαρεῖα, the feminine form of the adjective βαρύς (barús), meaning 'heavy' or 'low in pitch'. This was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as gravis, which then became the English word grave. The grave accent marks the stressed vowels of words in Maltese, Catalan, and Italian. A general rule in Italian is that words that end with stressed -a, -i or -u must be marked with a grave accent. Words that end with stressed -e or -o may bear either an acute accent or a grave accent, depending on whether the final e or o sound is closed or open, respectively. Some examples of words with a final grave accent are città ('city'), così ('so/then/thus'), più ('more'/'plus'), Mosè ('Moses'), and portò (' brought/carried'). Typists who use a keyboard without accented characters and are unfamiliar with input methods for typing accented letters sometimes use a separate grave accent or even an apostrophe instead of the proper accent character. This is nonstandard but is especially common when typing capital letters: *E` or *E’ instead of È (' is'). Other mistakes arise from the misunderstanding of truncated and elided words: the phrase un po’ ('a little'), which is the truncated version of un poco, may be mistakenly spelled as *un pò. Italian has word pairs where one has an accent marked and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning—such as pero ('pear tree') and però ('but'), and Papa ('Pope') and papà ('dad'); the last example is also valid for Catalan. In Bulgarian, the grave accent sometimes appears on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, and ъ to mark stress. It most commonly appears in books for children or foreigners, and dictionaries—or to distinguish between near-homophones: па̀ра (pàra, 'steam/vapour') and пара̀ (parà, 'cent/penny, money'), въ̀лна (bằlna, 'wool') and вълна̀ (bǎlnà, 'wave'). In Macedonian the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish homographs (see Disambiguation) and is put mostly on the vowels е and и. Then, it forces the stress on the accented word-syllable instead of having a different syllable in the stress group getting accented. In turn, it changes the pronunciation and the whole meaning of the group. Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian, and Russian used a similar system until the first half of the 20th century. Now the main stress is preferably marked with an acute, and the role of the grave is limited to marking secondary stress in compound words (in dictionaries and linguistic literature).