Talk:Grave accent

Uses in Latin

I have noted a grave accent used in a copy of Newton's Principia at the end of words. Exempli gratia, "perpetuo," with the accent on the final "o." I hypothosize that it is used to distinguish an adverb from an alternate form, but I would like to know its use with greater rigor. Should this be added to the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.215.144.197 (talk) 15:40, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't know much about it, but for some basic information check the section Diacritics in New Latin. — Eru·tuon 05:24, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Error or dialectical difference? (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 (third person singular present tense of avoir), as well as the adverb là "there" and the feminine definite article la;"

As a native French speaker I can say both are false; "a" the verb form is pronounce like the English "a" indefinate pronoun, while "à" is, well, sharper sounding (I can't describe the difference in linguistic terms, but I am saying both now and they are definately not the same, with "à" my mouth moves more to a smiling position while with "a" it remains rounder). The opposite is true with la/là, where "la" sounds like "à" and "là" sounds, for lack of an exact English comparaison, like a short O in German (like in "Loch", hole).

But my French is Québecois French, and it is possible that in European French these sounds coincide. I can imitate the Euro accent but I don't like it and so I tend to exaggerate it, and in that case the sounds do coincide - but as said I am not a reliable source for that, I don't know that that's proper. I've never payed attention to this detail upon listening to European French speakers. So which is it - a European peculiarity or an oversight of the editor?

Changes to the paragraph on Portuguese

I want to make some changes to the paragraph on Portuguese. The previous version had some inaccuracies, namely stating that the grave accent does not change pronunciation (it does in European Portuguese) and using the Portuguese word "crase" instead of the correct English term "crasis". I am going to create a new stub for "crasis" as well, but I do not know how to delete the "crase" page. Could someone help me with that? Since there are no other comments in this discussion page, I think I will go ahead with the edit. - S.V., 15 Nov 2005.

Good article review

Well-written

To my totally non-specialist eyes, a decent chunk of the article is pretty much unreadable. The first paragraph in usage for instance, I couldn't make head nor tail of, there wasn't even an obvious link to click to find out more - I recommend putting some notes in parenthesis to help the read along. While the lead section needs to be expanded, the rest follows a nice, logical order. There seemed to be no obvious grammatical, punctuation or spelling errors.

Factuially accurate

This is where it totally flops. No references whatsoever. It looks plausable but how do I know if it isn't referenced?

Broad

Yes, it seems to cover everything, if a little scantly. I'd like to see those one-sentence paragraphs exapanded to three or four sentences.

Neutrality

The article seems to simply be a recital of facts, hence is neutral.

Stability

In the last fortnight, only a few paragraphs have been rewritten. Looking good on this count.

Images

No images whatsoever in the article, but images aren't really necessary.

Summary:

• Well-written: Fail
• Factually accurate: Fail
• Broad: Pass (just)
• Neutrally written: Pass
• Stable: Pass
• Images: Pass

In all, this article is not ready for good article status at this time. Please do improve and re-nominate it in the future! --Celestianpower ^háblame 12:21, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like?

Since this is the English Wikipedia, could we get some examples of what vowels with grave accents sound like? For example, you could say ù sounds like the "u" in "bucket." If that's even right...like I said, it's not clear which sound goes with which character. indil 08:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Diacritics are all very rare in English. The best summary from en.wikipedia is in this poorly titled article section: here. The most important diacritics are the diaresis and grave accent. Each of those two indicates a letter is not "silent". No diacritics change a letter's sound except by either giving it any sound at all (e.g. a diaresis) or by shifting the stress of a word to the indicated vowel's syllable (e.g. an accent mark). Note that English readers may not distinguish between grave and acute accent marks, which only appear in poetry (mostly older poetry) or in foreign loanwords. One other convention, common but not universal in English, is to use a macron to represent long vowels and a breve to represent short vowels. This practice is only used in pronunciation instructions (e.g. in a dictionary). Ventifact (talk) 05:41, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Backquote

I think the #Computer_related section can be moved to [`] or backquote, which are for the moment (wrong) redirects to this page. -- Jokes Free4Me 14:38, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. A backtick (`) is not the same thing as a grave accent (`), even though it may look the same. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 21:20, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't agree. They're both ASCII character 96 (0x60). It's the same character used for several different purposes. Fumblebruschi 21:02, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I did this now. Try it out. It's on backtick as that was the most-linked term. The characters certainly are not equal, in modern use the character you get when you type that key on the keyboard has absolutely nothing to do with grave accents.Spitzak (talk) 22:12, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

from the greek

Wouldn't gravis have to be a transliteration, not translation, of the Greek barys? (Not to mention the closest any of my dictionaries come is saying it's "akin" to the Greek, not actually derived from it...) --Severinus 05:17, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Um, no. Transliteration is changing a word from one writing system to another; barys is a transliteration of the Greek βαρύς. 62.136.55.173 18:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Right, barys is a transliteration of βαρύς. What I meant to ask was if gravis wasn't also something like a transliteration—or anything other than a translation—of βαρύς. (Perhaps a calque was more what I was thinking.) Because "translation of" seemed to be expressing something other than derivation (otherwise why not use "derived from"?), and moreover the notion of gravis being a translation didn't make much sense to me. The implication of saying it's a translation is either that the notion of a heavy accent didn't exist in Latin until the Greek βαρύς was introduced (thus the Latin name for it was a translation of the Greek), or that gravis didn't exist in Latin with this meaning of "heavy" until it was used to translate βαρύς. Neither of which makes much sense. After looking around a bit on my own, gravis seems to've existed meaning "heavy" completely independently of the Greek βαρύς, and so it's hard to understand the point of mentioning the Greek word here at all, except to say that they're similar or equivalent, which adds little (and is completely different from what the article currently says). The implication of derivation simply doesn't hold, as both appear to be derived from independent PIE roots which existed in both languages:

bar - From Gk. baros "weight," cf. Skt guru, L. gravis; PIE *gwere- "heavy;" cf. Pers. bâr "weight," gerân "heavy," L. brutus "heavy, dull, stupid, brutish," Skt. bhara- "burden, load," bharati "he carries;" PIE *bher- "carry, give birth."[1]

It is from this full grade *gwreh2u- that gravis must be derived. *gwreh2u- became an -i- stem in Latin, as did all -u- stem adjectives so that *gwravis ... [2]

Moreover, looking at various dictionaries, most don't list the Greek, and those that do simply say it's "akin" to the Latin. So unless someone has some reason for linking the Latin and the Greek, I plan to remove latter, as it adds nothing but a false etymological implication. - Severinus 20:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Page Move

This page should not have been moved to include the accent (which, as far as I can tell, is just `). Somebody needs to move it back. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 23:52, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Grave Consonants

In phonetics there seems to be a use of the terms 'grave' and 'acute' to distinguish certain kinds of consonants. So, labials are called grave and dentals acute. I find this terminology confusing and turned to Wikipedia for an explanation of it, but there is none. Could it be added here, or could this article link to an article that explained i? Tibetologist 00:03, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Why no separate articles?

Why are there articles for é, á etc but not for the grave characters? IMHO, separate articles are a good idea, as you can have extremely precise information about the usage of each individual character, like exactly which languages it is used in. Any takers for a split to separate articles? Stevage 04:28, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

`a wondering what the backtick is used for`

What is the back Tick used for?67.176.22.90 (talk) 02:45, 11 May 2008 (UTC)Little Wayne

Trying to sign your comment, but forgetting to press shift. ```` [Someone the Person (talk) 01:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)]

ès / es

"È is rarely used to distinguish homonyms, except in dès/des ("since/some") and ès/es ("in/is")." I don't know much French, but I know that es does not translate specifically to "is," because it is the conjugation of être (to be) with tu, "you," so it would technically translate to "are," and est would translate to "is." I have never heard of ès meaning "in," only dans and en, but as I don't know much French this may be a different sense of "in." Someone the Person (talk) 01:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Ès means en les (in the) like in docteur ès sciences or in Riom-ès-Montagnes. It is pronunced ɛs contrary to "es" from tu es (you are) which is pronunced ɛ. BIRDIE ^✉ 10:42, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

French example?

È is rarely used to distinguish homonyms, except in dès/des ("since/some") and ès/es ("in/are").

And apparently in crème brûlée which is mentioned later. If that is not the (only) homonym usage, what is it? It's not discussed earlier. Długosz (talk) 15:53, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Crème is the pronunciation usage, not the homonym usage. Someone the Person (talk) 19:04, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

À redirects here

Several other-language Wikipedias have a page of its own for À (character A grave), but in the English-language Wikipedia were are redirected here. Is there a page of its own for À à? --85.156.232.211 (talk) 14:07, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Created page À. --85.156.232.211 (talk) 14:53, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Little History since ASCII Table links here

How about adding a little history how the grave accent made it into ASCII, since the ASCII wikipedia character table links here. I could dig the following:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/ascii-hist.html

"It appears to have been at their May 13-15, 1963 meeting that the CCITT decided that the proposed ISO 7-bit code standard would be suitable for their needs if a lower case alphabet and five diacritical marks, including the grave accent, were added to it.

At the October 29-31 meeting, then, the ISO subcommittee altered the ISO draft to meet the CCITT requirements, replacing the up-arrow and left-arrow with diacriticals, adding diacritical meanings to the apostrophe and quotation mark, and making the number sign a dual for the tilde."

Jan Burse (talk) 21:44, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

New use

There was found a use for the backtick as a the quote, following a noun, to indicate possession. The idea is to change convention so as to remove both ambiguity in usage and resolve an inconsistency in written English (vis-a-vis "it's" vs. "its" vs. "it is"). "It`s computers" with a backtick makes the grammar unambiguous that the item computer is possessed by the antecedent. The backtick allows the quote to "point to" the item possessed so is easy to remember. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.3.151.156 (talk) 19:39, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

lookèd

Please add an actual example of the use of lookèd, or else a different one where where -èd exemplifies such a use --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:51, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Well SOED says: "... ` to show that -ed is pronounced; 1596". So it's quite old and established. I'll try to find a picture of a real poem... Imaginatorium (talk) 16:35, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

The lede

The lede had become a laundry list of everyone's favourite language that uses the grave accent, quite a few of them having no real mention in the article. The lede is supposed to be a summary of the article, and should not contain anything not supported further down. I rewrote the lede, and removed the following from the laundry list. If you think any of these belong in the article, please reincorporate them in the body with some appropriate information...

• Breton
• Catalan
• Corsican
• Emilian-Romagnol
• West Frisian
• Haitian Creole
• Ligurian
• Occitan
• Piedmontese
• Portuguese
• Romansh
• Sardinian
• Scots Gaelic
• Vietnamese
• Welsh

Thanks. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:21, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

French historical usage?

fr:Accent grave very briefly describes the adoption of the grave accent in 16c France, but fr:Accent grave en français gives no detail. In the meantime I'm not sure what to make of Couperin's Nouveaux Concerts (1724) (at IMSLP) which uses only one right leaning accent ("léger", "muséte", "ritournéle" etc…). Sparafucil (talk) 00:13, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Unicode "forgot"?

"Unicode forgot to encode R-grave when encoding the letters with stress marks." A dramatic claim like this should surely have a citation. There's already a [Citation needed] - is there any followup for this? Stockhausenfan (talk) 20:40, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

I recommend removing this assertion. While there's no precomposed character, an r followed by U+0300 COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT suffices. In fact, that sequence appears later in the article. DRMcCreedy (talk) 23:41, 14 October 2023 (UTC)