Double acute accent
The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to by typographers as Hungarumlaut. The signs formed with diacritic marks are letters in their own right in the Hungarian alphabet (for instance, they are separate letters for the purpose of collation).
Uses
Vowel length
History
Length marks first appeared in Hungarian orthography in the 15th-century Hussite Bible. Initially, only á and é were marked, since they are different in quality as well as length. Later í, ó, ú were marked as well.
In the 18th century, before Hungarian orthography became fixed, u and o with umlaut + acute (ǘ, ö́) were used in some printed documents. 19th century typographers introduced the double acute as a more aesthetic solution.
Hungarian
In Hungarian, the double acute is thought of as the letter having both an umlaut and an acute accent. Standard Hungarian has 14 vowels in a symmetrical system: seven short vowels (a, e, i, o, ö, u, ü) and seven long ones, which are written with an acute accent in the case of á, é, í, ó, ú, and with the double acute in the case of ő, ű. Vowel length has phonemic significance in Hungarian, that is, it distinguishes different words and grammatical forms.
Acute accent
The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.
Uses
History
Apex
An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.
Pitch
Greek
The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is oxeîa (Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued into Latin as acūta "sharpened".
Stress
The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages:
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