Accent (font)
An accent or accent mark is understood in writing
- a diacritical accent that is used to mark the accent, i.e. , depending on the language, indicates a special emphasis, duration or height of a vowel;
- in the broader sense and imprecisely also a diacritical mark that is not intended for marking accents, but has the same or a similar shape as an accent mark in another language.
Accents have been known since ancient times and were introduced by the Greek grammarians .
Actual accent marks
The following characters are used as accents:
| character | example | language |
|---|---|---|
| ´ | Bogotá, μέρος | Spanish, Greek (poly- and monotonic orthography) |
| ` | più, σημειωτικὴ | Italian, Greek (polytonic orthography) |
| ͂ | πρᾶγμα | Greek (polytonic orthography) |
Sometimes emphatic or tonal accents are not used in standard orthography , but in textbooks and dictionaries, such as ´ (собо́р) in Russian , or ´ (é), `(è) in Swedish and Norwegian .
Although they are not the voice accent designate, the French diacritical marks ' (é), ` (è) and (ê) ( accent aigu , accent grave , accent circumflex ) (French to the accents accent ) counted because it depends on the form correspond to the Greek and also bear their (translated) names. In fact, these French additional characters belong to the second (following) category, since they change the quality of the designated sound, but do not mark the language accent.
A word can only have one main accented syllable. The following examples show that these characters do not designate the accent in French: cré é , ét é , Cléop â tre , cré è rent , also with the verb tâcher - despite the accent, the emphasis is on -er .
More characters
Characters that are not used to denote the accent but are often referred to as "accent" include:
| ´ | such as B. in Polish (Łódź), Serbian (Ignjić), Czech (Česká) and Slovak (stránka), Hungarian (kávéház), Icelandic (Íþróttir), Irish (Máirtín), ... |
| ^ | such as B. in Romanian (România, în), in Slovak (vôl, stôl, kôň) |
| ˝ | in Hungarian (hűtőszekrény) |
These characters, which are not actually accents , have different meanings in different languages. For example, the ´ sign in Polish, French, Icelandic, Irish, Croatian denotes a different sound than the sign without, in Czech and Slovak the length of the sound. In Hungarian, it also denotes the length , both for vowels and for the two umlauts Ő and Ű in the form of a double acute . Here the Á and the É have a special position, as the pronunciation changes from open to closed.
There are many other diacritical marks above the letter (for example the brevis , the tilde , the hatschek , the kroužek , the macron or the trema ), but they are not referred to as accents.
presentation
The preferred representation of the characters can vary. The acute cut is flatter in high-quality printing types in French and steeper in East Central European scripts (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian). In Hungarian, the acute acute can even be cut completely vertically if it is a grotesque font .
The Greek perispōménē (περισπωμένη “drive around, curve around”, seen as a combination of acute and grave accent) can be cut like a tilde , a circumflex or a macron .
In the Latin script, the main accent marks are:
- The acute example: é
- The double acute - in Europe in Hungarian as an extension sign: Ő
(Ő), ő(ő); Ű(Ű), ű(ű)and in Estonian (Ő, ő) - The grave accent - example: è
- The circumflex example: ê
