The
acute accent (
´) is a
diacritic mark used in written
French,
Spanish,
Portuguese,
Catalan,
Greek,
Welsh,
Hungarian,
Faroese,
Icelandic,
Italian,
Swedish,
Polish,
Czech,
Slovak,
Vietnamese,
Dutch,
Irish Gaelic,
Croatian,
Navajo and other languages.
á é í ó ú ý
Openness
In
French and
Italian, the acute accent is used only on the letter
e, where it changes the vowel sound.
In French, it distinguishes é e, and e @. In Italian, it makes an é be pronounced as e, in a position it would normally be pronounced as E; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish).
Stress or disambiguation
In
Spanish,
Portuguese, and
Catalan, the acute accent is used to mark the stressed vowel of a written word that would normally be stressed on another syllable. Stress is contrastive in those languages.
E.g., in Spanish
ánimo "a-ni-mo ("mood, spirit"),
animo a-"ni-mo ("I cheer"), and
animó a-ni-"mo ("he cheered") are three different words. In Welsh words the stress is always given on the penultimate syllable unless indicated otherwise by the use of an acute accent on the stressed vowel.
In Spanish and Dutch, the acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. In Spanish, various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo & como (how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the); in Dutch, mainly één (one) & een (a/an).
In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. E.g., "Ik ben vóór democratie, en was dat al vóór de dood van Pim Fortuyn." In this example, "vóór" is merely an emphasized form of "voor".
In Greek it is nowadays always used on the stressed syllable of a word. In Ancient Greek it more specifically indicated a syllable with a high tone, the grave accent and circumflex being used in other cases, but this distinction has disappeared in the modern language.
Openess or disambiguation
In
Swedish, the acute accent is also used only on the letter
e, mostly in words of French origin and in some names, and mostly on the last syllable of a word. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel sound, same as in French, and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include
resumé (accent on the last e only!) and
Linné (the title taken by
Carolus Linnaeus when he was knighted).
It is otherwise used in rare cases to show the accent of foreign and transcribed words (such as advéniat, svobóda).
Length
In
Hungarian,
Czech, and
Slovak the acute accent is used to mark the quantity or length of the base vowel. This is the same contrast that differentiated long and short vowels in classical Latin, or that nowadays differentiate simple and double vowels in written
Finnish. In Czech and Slovak a vowel marked with an accent is called a "long vowel"; it does not have the same meaning as a "long vowel" in English. In Czech, the letter
u can have an acute accent only at the beginning of a word or a word stem (after a prefix). To indicate a long
u in the middle or at the end of a word, a
kroužek (ring) is used instead, to form
ů. In Slovak, there are two more "long vowels" (which are consonants in the alphabet, but vowels in terms of their function) :
ŕ and
ĺ, which are pronounced just like ordinary
syllabic
r and
l, only longer.
The use of the acute (see also háček) to denote long pronunciation of Latin characters was introduced by Jan Hus in the 15th century into the Czech language and today it is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, Icelandians and partly by the Poles, although in many of these languages it has other function than marking the long vowels. It is also often used for international transliteration.
Palatalization
In
Polish, the acute accent is used over several letters - four consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate
palatalization, rather as the
háček is used in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg.
sześć {{IPA^ʃεɕʨ}} (six) However, the Polish
kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute. Over the vowel "ó" it indicates pronunciation change into /u/.
Other uses
In some
tonal languages such as
Vietnamese and
Mandarin Chinese, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone. In others, especially
African languages, it is used to indicate a high tone.
In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a síneadh fada (pronounced SHEE-na FA-da), is a sign of lenition and denotes a long vowel as opposed to a short one.
In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, an acute accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the second representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus su is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value /su/, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value /su/.
In Faroese, the acute accent is used on 5 of the vowels (a, i, o, u and y), but these letters, á, í, ó, ú and ý are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.
- á: long /Oa/, short /O/ and before /a/: /o~/
- í/ý: long /Ui:/, short /Ui/
- ó: long /Ou/, /Eu/ or /9u/, short: /9/, except Suðuroy: /O/
- When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it's pronunced /E/, except in Suðuroy where it's /O/
ú: long /u/, short /Y/
- When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it's pronunced /I/
In
Icelandic the acute accent is used on 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, as in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.
- á: /au(:)/
- é: /jE(:)/
- í/ý: /i(:)/
- ó: /ou(:)/
- ú: /u(:)/
All can be either short or long.
Use in English
As with other diacritical marks, a number of
loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent used in the original language: these include
sauté,
roué,
café,
touché,
fiancé, and
fiancée. Retention of the accent is common only in the
French ending
é or
ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word
résumé is commonly seen in English as
resumé, with only one accent.
The word acute is derived from the Latin acutus (sharp), itself a translation of the Greek oxys ().
Technical notes
The
ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters
á,
é,
í,
ó,
ú,
ý, and their respective
capital forms. Dozens more letters with the acute accent are available in
Unicode. Unicode also provides the acute accent as a
combining character.
See also
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
