Talk:Grave accent
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Grave accent was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. Reviewed version: April 12, 2006 |
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[edit] 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?
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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)
- 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:
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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)
[edit] `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
