Grave Accent - Uses - Stress

Stress

The grave accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in Catalan and Italian.

A general rule is that in Italian, words ending with stressed -a, -i, -o, -u must be marked with a grave accent. Words ending with stressed -e may bear either an acute accent or a grave accent, depending on whether the final 'e' sound is closed or open, respectively. Some examples of words with a final grave accent are: città "city", morì " died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò " brought, carried". A typist using a keyboard without accented characters who is unfamiliar with input methods for typing accented letters will sometimes use a separate backtick or even an apostrophe instead of the proper accent, though this is an error. This is especially common when typing capital letters, thus E` or E’ instead of È " is". Other mistakes arise from the misunderstanding of truncated and elided words: for example the phrase un po’, meaning "a little", which is the truncated version of un poco, is infrequently spelt as un pò. In Italian there are many pairs of words, one with an accent marked and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning, such as pero "pear tree" and però "but", and Papa "Pope" and papà "dad" (the last example is also valid for Catalan).

In Bulgarian and Macedonian, the grave is used on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, ъ (Bulgarian only), to mark stress. It is particularly used in books for children or foreigners, or to distinguish between near-homophones: па̀ра steam, vapour and пара̀ cent/penny, money, въ̀лна wool and вълна̀ wave. In a few cases (mostly on the vowels е and и) the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish words which are homonyms. For example, the Macedonian negation particle не is a homonym with the short-form of the direct object personal pronoun нe – thus нѐ. The grave in these cases forces the stress on the accented word-syllable, instead of having a different syllable in the stress group get accented. In turn, this changes the pronunciation and the whole meaning of the group.

In Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian and Russian, a similar system was in use until the first half of the 20th century. Now the main stress is preferably marked with an acute, and the role of grave is limited to marking secondary stress in compound words (in dictionaries and linguistic literature).

In the descendants of Serbo-Croatian and in Slovene, the stressed syllable can be short or long, as well as having rising or falling tone. To show this, these languages use (in dictionaries, orthography, and grammar books, for example) four different stress marks (grave, acute, double grave and circumflex). The system is identical both in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

In modern Church Slavonic, there are three stress marks (acute, grave and circumflex). There is no phonetical distinction between them, only the orthographical one. Grave is typically used when the stressed vowel is the last letter of a multi-letter word.

In Ligurian, the grave accent marks the accented short vowel of a word in à (sound ), è (sound ), ì (sound ) and ù (sound ). In the case of ò, it is used for the short sound of, but it may not be the stressed vowel of the word.