Graphic accent

The graphic accent or tilde (´) is a diacritic auxiliary orthographic sign that, in Spanish, is placed over vowels (a, e, i, o, u) according to the rules of graphic accentuation of the language.

In some Romance languages, such as Spanish, Catalan or French, diacritical accents are sometimes used to differentiate some words from others with the same spelling but with different meanings and uses in: Spanish, de (preposition) and dé (deliver); in Catalan, Déu ("God") and deu ("ten"); in French, du («of», contract article) and dû («due»).

In several languages, the orthographic accent has some variants, such as the acute accent (´), which is the most frequent, the circumflex (^) or the grave (`). Each type of accent can fall on different types of vowel; for example, in Romance languages, the grave accent generally appears on open stressed vowels—although in Lombard ù indicates the front rounded vowel ü indicated in the IPA as [y]—. In Spanish, the acute accent is the only one that can go on a vowel. In French, the circumflex is often used to indicate the loss of an implosive -s (Old French isle, today île), although in Portuguese the same circumflex accent has the objective of indicating the degree of opening of the vowel. In Greek, in Guarani and exceptionally in Spanish («Aýna») there is y with an acute accent (ý).

Nomenclature

The spelling accent is commonly referred to as tilde or accent. However, both are ambiguous words. In addition to the graphic accent, there is the prosodic accent and the regional accent and, for its part, tilde can be any stroke of a letter, including the transversal of the t or the undulation on the ñ. In the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (the Dictionary of the Spanish language or DRAE), it is considered that for tilde, the meanings of "rayita" and "orthographic sign" are one. with that criterion, accent and tilde would not be exact synonyms. However, they consider that these are two different meanings. In summary, accent and tilde share a meaning that is exactly synonymous and, separately, they have several others that are not.

Uses of the acute accent (´)

In Spanish, the orthographic accent is only used to mark some of the tonic vowels, that is, those that according to certain normative orthographic rules must be marked to avoid ambiguities and facilitate reading. Thus, we can differentiate:

mood (substantive) Annimo (verb present) and animó (verb in the past) as well as

circle (substantive) Circle (verb present) and Circle (verb in the past).

But in other languages, the acute accent has the function of marking other phonological characteristics, such as opening, phonological accent, vowel quantity or tone.

Opening

In some languages, such as French, the fact that a vowel is marked with an acute accent means that it is a phonologically closed vowel.

Phonological accent of intensity

In Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance languages, the acute accent is used to denote some phonological accents of intensity. According to certain specific orthographic rules, its use is obligatory in certain contexts and, in others, the phonological stress is not explicitly marked.

Vowel Quantity

In Hungarian, Irish, Czech, and even marginally in some Classical Latin writings, stress marks vowel quantity.

Palatalized joint

In Polish, the acute accent is used on five letters (including consonant marks). On consonants, the stress indicates that they have a palatalized sound, as in the word sześć /ʃɛɕʨ/ ‘six’. This use of the acute accent in Polish is similar to the use of háček in Czech and other Slavic languages. Typographically, this Polish "accent" or kreska is somewhat more upright than the conventional acute accent, and is placed somewhat more to the right of center. On the vowel o (ó), instead, it indicates a pronunciation in u (historically, the accent indicated the position of a long vowel).

Spanish diacritic accent

In addition to marking the tonic vowel of the word, in Spanish there is the so-called diacritic accent, which allows us to differentiate words that sound the same or almost the same: when he writes (when that person registers in writing) is differentiated with a diacritical accent from when the scribe (when the amanuensis).

Character codes

Both the sign (´), as well as the vowels with tilde, are present in several of the usual character codes. For this purpose, these codes assign a number to each character, necessary to be able to represent them correctly.

Because ASCII does not have letters with tildes, among other characters necessary to write Western languages, various extensions such as CP850 and ISO 8859-1 were created, incompatible with each other, designed exclusively for some Western languages. With the purpose of creating a single standard, Unicode is established, which extends ISO 8859-1, adding support for various accented letters such as: ά, ǽ, ć, ḉ, έ, ǵ, ή, ί, ḱ, ĺ, ḿ, ń, ό, ǿ, ṕ, ŕ, ś, ẃ, ύ, ź.

The codes for accented vowels in Spanish are:

Methods of writing characters with accents

In order to write the accent on computers that do not have a specific key for this, it is possible to use several methods. On Windows computers with keyboards designed for the US market, the most practical method is the "US International" keyboard layout.

In MS-DOS and Windows, press the Alt plus a decimal number typed on the numpad. If a leading zero is added to the number, the current code page will be used, for example Alt+0211 for OR. Otherwise, also depending on the language, the codes will correspond to for example CP850 or CP437, for example Alt+130 for é.

On Mac OS X, pressing Alt+E, followed by the letter to be accented. For example Alt+E, followed by A for á.

In GTK+ applications, such as GIMP or Inkscape, you can enter any character, keeping Control and ⇧ Shift while typing corresponding Unicode code, for example Control+⇧ Shift+U+E1 for á.

In the vim text editor it is possible to enter accented keys using digraphs, in insert mode or in command mode, by pressing Control+K, followed by ' and the letter to accent.

Some sites, such as Wikipedia or the automatic translator Babel fish, allow you to insert accented letters when clicking on a link within a box.