User:Melroch/Accents

A note on my use of accent marks

Since the use of accent marks in some of my conlangs may be a bit original some explanation of it may be in order. Basically it employs the three most common |accent marks, the acute ( ˊ  ), the grave ( ˋ  ) and the circumflex ( ˆ  ) according to the following pattern (exemplified on the letter a:

The impetus for the system¹ comes from two conflicting uses of the acute accent mark in Western orthographies: in some languages (e.g. Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Welsh and (optionally) Russian) it is used to mark the stressed vowel of a word. In other languages it is used to mark vowel length (orthographically in Irish, Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak; in scholarly use also in Old Norse² and Old English³). To most modern people the stress-marking use of the acute is probably the most familiar (beside the French and Portuguese use of accent marks to indicate vowel quality), but I first met

Notes

Note 1

This system of using accent marks was suggested to me by Raymond Brown. I readily and enthusiastically took to using it, and still am enthusiastic about it. To my knowledge Ray has never used the system himself (indeed nobody but myself seems to have used it), but I wish to acknowledge him as the inventor; I don't think it would have occurred to me on my own, since I was quite set in my earlier less systematic use of accent marks.

Note 2

In modern Icelandic the acute is used in the same positions in the same words as scholars put it in Old Norse, but they no longer indicate vowel length, since the old distinction between long and short vowels has in the course of the history of the language developed into a distinction of quality, with most of the old long vowels having become diphthongs.

Note 3

The Anglo-Saxons themselves apparently used the acute as length mark only occasionally if at all. The use by Old English scholars dates only from the 19^th century, and was then probably inspired by the use in Irish and the somewhat less occasional use in Old Norse. Nowadays Old English scholars seem to prefer the macron, but I first met Old English in Tolkien when I was ten years old, and old habits die hard! ☺