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.
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 /ɡɹɑːv/, not like grave meaning serious or a tomb. It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly: accent grave /aksɑ̃ ɡʁav/.
Pitch
The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occured 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 are the Italian words città "city", morì "[he/she] died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò "[he/she] brought, carried". Especially with capital 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 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 in several Romance languages. In French, Italian and Catalan, it indicates that these vowels are open.
In Catalan and Italian, the grave accent, in addition to being used to indicate word stress, also indicates the open pronunciation: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]).
In French, the grave accent on the letter e also marks the distinct quality of the vowel, è [ɛ] versus é [e].
Disambiguation
The grave accent is used to distinguish homophones in French, Italian and Catalan.
In Italian, for example, it distinguishes the conjunction e "and" from the verb è "(he/she/it) is". In Catalan, it is also used sometimes to distinguish words with different meanings but the same pronunciation (homophones): compare ma "my" and mà "hand".
In 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.
In Norwegian, the grave accent also differentiates between certain words, e.g. 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 /lʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced /ˈlʊkɪd/ (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 /lɜː(r)nd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜː(r)nɪd/.
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. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character.
In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Outside the U.S. character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many much older UK computers 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.
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.
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 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.
In Unlambda, the backquote character denotes function application.
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