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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.
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 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 ...
the acute accent (née) and grave accent (English poetry marking, changèd), modifying vowels or marking stresses; the circumflex (entrepôt), borrowed from French; the diaeresis (Zoë), indicating a second syllable in two consecutive vowels; the tittle, the dot found on the regular small i and small j, is removed when another diacritic is required
The grave (accent grave) marks the sound /ɛ/ when over an e, as in père ("father") or is used to distinguish words that are otherwise homographs such as a/à ("has"/"to") or ou/où ("or"/"where"). The acute (accent aigu) is only used in "é", modifying the "e" to make the sound /e/, as in étoile ("star").
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 ...
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
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.