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The acute (accent aigu) is only used in "é", modifying the "e" to make the sound /e/, as in étoile ("star"). The circumflex (accent circonflexe) generally denotes that an S once followed the vowel in Old French or Latin, as in fête ("party"), the Old French being feste and the Latin being festum. Whether the circumflex modifies the vowel's ...
The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar); the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).
Originally, certain proclitic words lost their accent before another word and received the grave, and later this was generalized to all words in the orthography. Others—drawing on, for instance, evidence from ancient Greek music —consider that the grave was "linguistically real" and expressed a word-final modification of the acute pitch.
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 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 ...
Ever wondered how to add an accent, or where the degree symbol is? These printable keyboard shortcut symbols will make your life so much easier. The post 96 Shortcuts for Accents and Symbols: A ...
The alternative to the grave accent in Mandarin is the numeral 4 after the syllable: pà = pa4. In African languages and in International Phonetic Alphabet, the grave accent often indicates a low tone: Nobiin jàkkàr ('fishhook'), Yoruba àgbọ̀n ('chin'), Hausa màcè ('woman'). The grave accent represents the low tone in Kanien'kéha or ...
Heise comments: “In transliterations the same sounds that are represented by different cuneiform signs are distinguished with an accent or an index. The signs for ni, ní (i with accent aigu), nì (i with accent grave), ni4, ni5, ... are all different cuneiform symbols. ní may be called (and pronounced among Assyriologists) ni2 and nì as ni3.
The grave/acute distinction has lost its relevance in modern phonetics, but it may still be relevant to other disciplines. The distinction dates from relatively early in the days of acoustic phonetics, at a time that some phonologists believed that one could categorize all speech sounds by a finite set of acoustically-defined distinctive features, which were supposed to correspond to auditory ...