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À	à
È	è
Ì	ì
Ò	ò
Ù	ù
Ẁ	ẁ
Ỳ	ỳ

The 'grave accent' (' ` ') is a diacritical mark used in written Catalan, French, Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), Italian, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, and other languages.
The word ''grave'' is derived from the Latin ''gravis'' (heavy). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv", IPA , not like ''grave'' meaning "serious" or a "tomb." It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly: ''accent grave'' .

Contents

Pitch

Stress

Height

Disambiguation

Length

Tone

Other uses

Use in English

Computer-related

See also

External links

Pitch

The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high pitch (indicated by an acute accent) was lowered because of a following word in the same sentence. Since Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, this diacritic has been replaced with an acute accent mark in the modern monotonic orthography.

Stress

The grave accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in Catalan and Italian. Some examples from Italian are ''città'' "city", ''morì'' "[he/she] died", ''virtù'' "virtue", ''Mosè'' "Moses", ''portò'' "[he/she] brought, carried". Especially with capital letters, or when using a keyboard without accented letters, an apostrophe is sometimes used instead of it in Italian, thus ''E’'' instead of ''È'' "[he/she/it] is", though this is considered (at least) inelegant and inaccurate.
In Italian there are pairs of words, one accented and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning, such as ''pero'' "pear tree" and ''però'' "but".
In Norwegian (both bokmål and Nynorsk), the grave accent is used to indicate stress on a syllable that would otherwise be unstressed. Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, does not respect these rules much, and there is a certain interchangeability with the acute accent.

Height

The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels ''e'' and ''o'', indicating that they are pronounced open: ''è'' (as opposed to ''é'' ); ''ò'' (as opposed to ''ó'' ), in several Romance languages:

★ Catalan

★ French

★ Italian

★ Occitan

Disambiguation

The grave accent is used to distinguish homophones in several languages:

★ Catalan, where it distinguishes, for example, ''ma'' "my" from ''mà'' "hand".

★ French. The grave accent on the letters ''a'' and ''u'' has no effect on pronunciation and only serves to distinguish homonyms that are otherwise spelled the same. It distinguishes the preposition ''à'' "to" and the verb ''a'' (present tense of ''avoir''), as well as the adverb ''là'' "there" and the feminine definite article ''la''; it is also used in the word ''déjà'' and the phrase ''çà et là'' ("hither and thither"; without the accent, it would literally mean "it and the"). It is used on the letter ''u'' only to distinguish ''où'' "where" and ''ou'' "or". In those French comic books which are hand-lettered all in capitals, the symbol is very short atop the ''E'' or ''U'', but slides down on the right of the ''A'', though not descending past the cross-bar.

★ Italian, where it distinguishes for example the conjunction ''e'' "and" from the verb ''è'' "he/she/it is", or the female article ''la'' from the adverb ''là'' "there". Another common disambiguation occurs in a very large number of Italian verbs: ''mangio'' means "I eat" while ''mangiò'' means "he/she ate"; ''porto'' means "I carry" while ''portò'' means "he/she carried". Adding the accent shifts the meaning of such verbs from the first person present to the third person past.

★ Norwegian, where it differentiates between certain words, such as ''og'' "and" and ''òg'' "also".

Length

In Welsh, the accent is used to denote a short vowel sound in a word which would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound, for example ''mẁg'' "mug" versus ''mwg'' "smoke".
In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel.

Tone

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone.
In African languages, the grave accent is often used to indicate a low tone, e.g. Nobiin ''jàkkàr'' 'fish-hook', Yoruba ''àgbọ̀n'' 'chin', Hausa ''màcè'' 'woman'.

Other uses

In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis). For example, instead of ''a aquela hora'', one says and writes ''àquela hora'' "at that hour".

Use in English

The grave accent is used in English only in poetry and song lyrics. It indicates that a vowel usually silent is to be pronounced, in order to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word ending with -ed. For instance, the word ''looked'' is usually pronounced as a single syllable, with the ''e'' silent; when written as ''lookèd'', the ''e'' is pronounced (''look-ed''). It can also be used in this capacity to distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, ''learned'' , from the adjective ''learnèd'' .
Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, ''vis-à-vis'', ''pièce de résistance'', ''crème brûlée''.

Computer-related

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters ''à'', ''è'', ''ì'', ''ò'', ''ù'', and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the grave accent are available in Unicode.
In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character, encoded as 768, hex 300. Outside the U.S. character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many older UK computers, such as the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, have the £ symbol as character 96.
On many computer keyboards, the grave accent occupies a key by itself, and is meant to be combined with vowels as a multi-key combination. However, programmers have used the key by itself for a number of tasks.
On a Mac, to get a character, such as à, the user must type Option-` and then the vowel. For example, to make à, the user must type Option-` and then 'a', and to make À, the user must type Option-` and then Shift-a.
In many PC based computer games, the grave accent key is often used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.
When using TeX to typeset text, the grave accent on its own is used in lieu of a dedicated open-quote key. For example, ` becomes a single opening quote (‘) and `` becomes a double opening quote (“). Compared to algorithmic ‘quote education’ available in modern word processors, this method has the advantage of it becoming completely unambiguous (consider ‘the ’60s’ or the archaic ‘’twas’ – most modern word processors would incorrectly render these as ‘the ‘60s’ and ‘‘twas’, respectively). The primary disadvantage is that it requires the user to adjust to this style.
Many of the UNIX shells and the programming language Perl use pairs of this character—known as ''backquote'' or ''backtick''—to indicate substitution of the standard output from one command into a line of text defining another command. For example, echo `uname -a` would execute echo ''[output of "uname -a"]''.
In Lisp macro systems, the backquote character (called ''quasiquote'' in Scheme) introduces a quoted expression in which comma-substitution may occur. It is identical to the plain quote, except that symbols prefixed with a comma will be replaced with those symbols' values as variables. This is roughly analogous to the Unix shell's variable interpolation with $ inside double quotes.
In MySQL, it is used in queries as a table and database classifier.
In the Python programming language, "backticks" are used as a synonym for the repr() function, which converts its argument to a string suitable for a programmer to view. However, this feature has been removed in the upcoming Python 3000. Backticks are also used extensively in the reStructuredText plain text markup language (implemented in the Python docutils package).
In Pico, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.
In Verilog the grave accent is used to define constants (e.g. after the line `define NUM 100, `NUM can be used as a synonym for 100) whereas the apostrophe is used in specifying sized constants (for example, 5'd10 is a 5-bit constant with the value 10). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent and vice versa is a frequent beginner mistakes in the language.
In Unlambda, the backquote character denotes function application.

See also

★ Acute accent

★ Double grave accent

★ Circumflex accent

External links

★ Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents

★ ASCII and Unicode quotation marks — "Please do not use the ASCII grave accent as a left quotation mark"

★ Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer