The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese, and other languages. A diacritical mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... 1982 is a number and represents a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar Events January January 6 - William Bonin is convicted of being the freeway killer. January 8 - AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 - Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime... Polytonic orthography for Greek uses a variety of diacritics (πολύ = many + τόνος = accent) to represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. ... Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ... Scottish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, or just Gaelic (Gàidhlig; IPA: ), is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages. ...

In Greek the grave accent occurs only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high tone (indicated by an acute accent) was lowered in Ancient Greek because of a following word in the same sentence. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent. The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Vietnamese, Dutch, Irish Gaelic, Croatian, Navajo and other languages. ... Polytonic orthography for Greek uses a variety of diacritics (πολύ = many + τόνος = accent) to represent aspects of Ancient Greek pronunciation. ... Monotonic orthography is the simplified way for spelling modern Greek introduced in the 1980s. ...

In French, the grave accent has two uses. On the letter e it marks the distinct quality of the vowel: è [ɛ], and e [ə]. On the letters a and u it is used only as a grammatical mark that has no effect on pronunciation. On a it distinguishes the preposition à ("to") and the verb a (present tense of avoir), as well as distinguishing là ("there") and the feminine definite article la; it is also used in the word déjà and the phrase çà et là. On u it is used only to distinguish où ("where") and ou ("or"). Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzards 1996 performance released on video and CD. The video/DVD and CD performances were both recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, England. ...

In Catalan, the grave accent is used to mark both the stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as è [ɛ] versus é [e], or such as ò [ɔ] versus ó [o]. The letter a is the only one that takes the grave accent but not the acute. Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ...

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 ("a mug") versus mwg ("smoke"). Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...

In Italian, it marks final stress, as in virtù ("virtue") or città ("city") or as in è ("it is"). In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone. Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ... Mandarin  listen(Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. ...

In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel. Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates the fusion of the feminine definite article "a" with the preposition "a" (required by several verbs; can be equivalent, for instance, of "to"). The fusion is called crase: "à" or "às". The grave accent does not change the pronunciation of "a". The grave accent can be used also in the fusion of the preposition "a" and demonstrative pronouns: "aquele" and "aquela" (that one), "aqueles" and "aquelas" (those) and "aquilo" (that), composing "àquele", "àquela", "àqueles", "àquelas" and "àquilo". Crase is the fusion of the preposition a with the feminine definite article a in Portuguese, marked with a grave accent, resulting in à. à For example, the sentence Vou a a casa de João (I am going to Johns) would be written as Vou à casa de João, which...

In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, a grave accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the third representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus u is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value [u], while ù transliterates the third sign with the value [u] (usually used for "and"). Cuneiform script The Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ...

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. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The past tense is a verb tense expressing action, activity, state or being in the past. ... An adjective is a part of speech which modifies a noun, usually making its meaning more specific. ...

The word grave is derived from the Latin gravis (heavy), itself a translation of the Greek barys (βαρύς). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv" (IPA /gɹɑːv/), in other words not like grave meaning serious or a tomb. It seems to come from French, which pronounces the word exactly that way : accent grave (akse~ /gɹɑːv/)). Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

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. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... This article shows Unicode characters from 128 to 999. ...

In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Outside the US character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many UK computers have the UK pound symbol as character 96. There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... The pound sterling, which strictly speaking refers to basic currency unit of sterling, now the pound, can generally refer to the currency of the United Kingdom (UK). ...

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.

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. A safer and often easier way to accomplish such a task is using the command xargs instead of backquotes. A Unix shell, also called the command line, provides the traditional user interface for the Unix operating system. ... A programming language or computer language is a standardized communication technique for expressing instructions to a computer. ... Programming Republic of Perl logo Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is an interpreted procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall. ... The standard streams are a set of input and output channels featured in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and provided by the standard I/O library (stdio. ... xargs is a command of the Unix and most Unix-like operating system which eases passing command output to another command as command line arguments. ...

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. Lisp is a functional programming language family with a long history. ... Macro (meaning large or wide) is also applied to macroeconomics, and macroscopic or macro lenses. ... Scheme is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. ... A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. ...

In Pico the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language. Pico is a programming language developed at the PROG lab at the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, VUB). ...

In Verilog the grave accent is used to help define a size constant (for example, 2`b01). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent is one of the top five beginner mistakes in the language. The Verilog HDL is a hardware description language, used for the design of ASICs and FPGAs in order to make digital circuits. ...

See also

• acute accent
• circumflex
• diacritic marks
• diaeresis
• umlaut

The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Vietnamese, Dutch, Irish Gaelic, Croatian, Navajo and other languages. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. ... A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... In linguistics, a diaeresis or dieresis (AE) (from Greek diairein, to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ...

External Links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (http://diacritics.typo.cz)