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The grave accent ( ̀) (/ ɡ r eɪ v / GRAYV [1] [2] or / ɡ r ɑː v / GRAHV [1] [2]) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English.
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).
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 ...
Grave (symbol) Quotation mark#Typewriters and early computers ̀: Grave (diacrictic) Acute, Circumflex, Tilde: Combining Diacritical Marks, Diacritic > Greater-than sign: Angle bracket « » Guillemet: Angle brackets, quotation marks: Much greater than Hedera: Dingbat, Dinkus, Index, Pilcrow: Fleuron ‐ Hyphen: Dash, Hyphen-minus-Hyphen-minus
In Italian, the grave accent is used over any vowel to indicate word-final stress: Niccolò (equivalent of Nicholas and the forename of Machiavelli). It can also be used on the nonfinal vowels o and e to indicate that the vowel is stressed and that it is open: còrso, "Corsican", vs. córso, "course"/"run", the past participle of "correre".
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. [2 ...
It is also known as backquote, grave, or grave accent. The character was designed for typewriters to add a grave accent to a (lower-case [ a ] ) base letter, by overtyping it atop that letter. [ 1 ] On early computer systems, however, this physical dead key +overtype function was rarely supported, being functionally replaced by precomposed ...
The ancient Greek grammarians indicated the word-accent with three diacritic signs: the acute (ά), the circumflex (ᾶ), and the grave (ὰ). The acute was the most commonly used of these; it could be found on any of the last three syllables of a word.