Grave accent

A Gravis (Latin gravis "serious", " fierce " ), French grave accent is a diacritical mark, or more precisely an accent on the labeling of a particular pronunciation, emphasis or importance of a letter. It is in the write direction of inclined, short line above the letter (eg à, è ), the counterpart to the acute. The grave is used in different languages ​​; the exact meaning it differs from language to language.

• 2.1 Character Sets

Use

Greek

The Gravis first emerged in the 3rd century BC in ancient Greek, where he βαρεῖα bareía ( " severity ", neugr. Pronunciation varia) was called. In modern Greek it is obsolete since 1976.

Today, it occurs particularly in French and there is grave accent ( [ aksɑ ɡʀav ː ] ) called. Its meaning depends on the vowel on which he is employed.

• à and ù occur only in a few cases and usually have no phonetic, but merely a semantic differentiation to an end. Word examples: a ("[ he / she / it ] has " ) - à ( "to", "the ", " to" ) or ou ( "or" ) - où ( "where" ).
• è ( phonetic value: [ ɛ ] ) shows an open e to ( it corresponds roughly to the German ä ). It differs phonetically clear from the é with Accent aigu ( phonetic value [e ], equivalent to a short spoken German eh) or of e, which is either the schwa sound displays ( phonetic value corresponds approximately unaccented German s like murmur in ) or not very ( especially at the end of a word ). The è ê is just as pronounced with Accent circonflexe.

The accent grave but not indicates the emphasis, as in French, only the end of a word or syntagm is emphasized. Unstressed è is not very common, but comes in a few words before (eg in évènement ).

Other Romance languages

Occurs on the Gravis in other Romance languages. In Italian, he shows, first, in some cases, the emphasis of each vowel to if it differs from the standard emphasis, for example in caffè ( "coffee", in contrast, the French café with Accent Aigu ), secondly it marks the variable vowels / e / and / o / as open ( [ ɛ ] and [ ɔ ] ). In addition, it can also be used to express a meaning difference, for example, in the words è ("[ he / she / it ] is ") to e ( " and"). In Catalan the Gravis marks a syllable carrying the tone different from the general stress rules: à in " català ( " Catalan ")," Dema " ( " tomorrow " ) or" caracter " ( " character " ), è in Valencia or " Francès " ( " french" ). In Portuguese, the Gravis denotes the crasis of the preposition a with the following articles a and as well as the demonstrative Aquele, aqueles, Aquela, aquelas and Aquilo, ie à, às, Aquele etc. Phonetic is the open debate [ a] of the unstressed a denotes that would otherwise [ ɐ ] loud.

Celtic languages

In Scottish Gaelic the Gravis is used to identify the length of vowels.

In Welsh, however, it serves to identify the shortness of vowels in words, where else a long debate would be expected here also a vowel pronounced WW [ ʊ ] and yy [y ] or [ ɪ ] occur. eg MWG [ mʊɡ ] " cup " towards mwg [ mu ː ɡ ] "smoke".

Chinese

For the phonetic transcription of the Chinese language ( Hanyu Pinyin) the Gravis is used to illustrate the fourth tone ( falling).

IPA

Similar to the Double Acute « ̋ " there is also a Doppelgravis " ̏ ", which is used, inter alia, in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Computer science

In computer science, the lone character fachsprachlich as backtick or backquote (English for " backward inclined apostrophe " or " single quote " ) Perl is called and pairs of parentheses around identifiers (MySQL) or embedded command line commands ( Unix shell, etc. ) is used.

Display on the computer

Fonts

In the ASCII character set in a secluded Gravis comes before `. In the character sets of ISO 8859 family selected character with grave occur, ISO 8859-1, for example, contains characters à, à, È, è, ì Ì, Ò, ò, ù ù and.

Unicode contains additional finished composed character with Gravis. In addition, any character with grave can be represented by adjusting one combining Gravis Unicode base. The single character has the Unicode designation GRAVE ACCENT ( U 0060 number ).

TeX and LaTeX can represent any character with Gravis. There are to two different commands.

• In Text mode for text generating set \ `a a \ à. The \ is then delete it.
• In math mode for the set of formulas \ grave a generates the formula.