Ok people, somebody asked me a question the other day and after a couple of days researching I’m still at a loss.
What is the ` symbol called? As in the one that shares the key with the tilde(~).
Is it simply another form of apostrophe?
It’s a grave accent. Not really a punctuation mark, although some people seem to think it’s a kind of apostrophe or quotation mark and (incorrectly) uses it as such.
“back-quote” or “back-squote” are a common terms for it among the programming community although that’s probably not the official name.
It’s the same shape as the grave accent used in French and other similar languages, so that’s probably the most correct name for it.
Its a diacritical marking denoting the letter `ayn in Arabic.
Alternatively its called a back-tick. At least in my mind it is.
That or its the thing you need two of to get a start quote in LaTeX.
etc.
ok, so what does it do? for English?
I think it must have a purpose, if its on the QWERTY keyboard…
but then again, maybe not.
I think “backtick” is more common.
By itself, it’s meaningless typographically. Its intended use on the keyboard is for entering characters with a grave accent, such as à and è. The use in programming, Unix shells, and TeX followed from the fact that the character could be entered without too much hassle using common keyboards.
So when did Una Persson dethrone Cecil and become The Master?
Cripes, I don’t visit the SDMB for a day or two and I really fall behind on things …
<hijack> Just curious, is there an easy and quick way to make these letters with the accent marks appear like this in type? I have Windows Me [and XP] and MS Word. Whenever I e-mail my brother in French, for example, I’ve just relying on his knowledge of where the accent marks would be.
Thx </hijack>
Not terribly quick, but one easy-ish method is to use the Character Map application. Go to Start | Programs | Accessories and look under it and its submenus (might be under System Tools, even) for the program. Use this to cut-n-paste in accented letters.
You can set Windows up to do it more like Macs do, where you hit an Option- combo on the keyboard and then the appropriate letter to get an accented character, by … I think it was by changing your keyboard to US International.
I’d do it, because I love the ease of entering accented characters, but two of the accent characters it uses are ’ and ", so when you type those characters, Windows waits for your next character to see if you’re doing an accent. You have to hit ’ or " twice to get an actual apostrophe or quotation mark, respectively. And since I do a lot of word processing with apostrophes and quotes, and relatively few accented characters, I reluctantly have to keep using Character Map (and the few Alt- codes I have memorized, like Alt-0233 for an accented e) to enter my accented characters.
Maybe somebody knows a better way to enter accented characters in Windows? Perhaps a resident program that lets you use Mac-like keystrokes for accented character entry? If not, somebody better at programming than me should create one. Although PC keyboards don’t have an Option key … but I’m sure a substitute can be found.
Here’s a page with some Alt key symbols:
Not for English, per se.
Here’s a “history of ASCII” article I like to refer to for questions of this sort:
http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/index.html
The backtick was one of a number of characters not present in the 1963 ASCII spec, added in the 1967 version. See the ASCII-1967 section in that document.
One of a group of characters intended for “national use”, it was designated as a “diacritical mark”, as observed above. ASCII evolved through a long series of committee fights over what ought to be included, with many different factions wanting their pet punctuation marks included in the limited space. The “diacriticals” were generally advanced by people wanting some ability to “build up” accented characters for non-English languages.
Once in the character set, of course, it becomes available for all sorts of unintended use by programmers who need to invent syntactic conventions in various contexts. In most (though not all) cases, the coding use came after the character, and was not the reason it was originally included. The poor innocent grave accent was just lying around on the keyboard when hijacked for command substitution in UNIX shells, for instance.
I’ve always just called it the “single quote”.
And why are people questioning its inclusion on the QWERTY keyboard? Haven’t you ever typed a contraction before?
Yes, I’ve typed many contractions.
However, for each and every one of them I’ve used the mark found to the left of the Enter key rather than the very different mark we’re talking about here.
’ versus `
I hate it when people use these things for open quotes. As the staff report says, there are very few fonts for which they’re actually complementary to the apostrophes, and it just looks horrible. I say ``no thank you’’ to this practice.
In MS Word, if you use Insert/Symbol, it will show you, at the bottom of the table from which you select the characters, the shortcut keys that will produce that character. And you can change the shortcut by using the “shortcut Key” button.
For à, the shortcut is “Ctrl `, a”; for á it’s “Ctrl ', a”, etc.
From Word you can cut and paste into your e-mail program.
I usually use WordPerfect instead of word, and I have set up a custom keyboard with the shortcuts the way I want them for accented letters.
When I use US-International, I always hit space after one of those keys to enter the mark itself. It’s probably a little faster than hitting it twice, but not as fast as you like.
True, it’s very often used that way by people who lack facility in typing extended ASCII or for use across different systems.
But in standard Arabic transliteration (e.g. that used by the Library of Congress, the Board of Geographic Names, the Middle East Journal, etc.), this letter is represented by a left-handed curly apostrophe. I’m gonna make it big so you can see the shape easier:
**‘**ayn
You get it with the Unicode number Alt 0145.
Its close relative is the right-handed curly apostrophe, used for the Arabic hamzah:
**’ **
And this is Unicode Alt 0146.
Don’t forget Hebrew, Amharic, and other Semitic languages have these signs too.
I use a lot of foreign languages and always need to type these extended ASCII characters. So I personally find it works much better to memorize the Unicode numbers for each one. That way I can just keep typing uninterrupted and don’t have to bother with opening up Character Map. I only open Character Map when I need to look up a new number, and then I commit it to memory.