I took this picture outside a café near my work. Notice I wrote café with an accent, not cafe’ with an apostrophe. I guess the sign maker wasn’t able to include accents, or maybe it was cost prohibitive and they thought no one would notice. I noticed. But at least they are clear about the fact that they are a café that serves coffee…
As it turns out, the forward facing accent is called the acute accent, and the backward facing accent is called the grave accent (pronounced ‘grav’, not like the place you put a corpse, maybe they need to put an accent on that final ‘e’ so we would know). They are used for different reasons in different languages. If you’d like to know more, look them up in Wikipedia, I didn’t find anything there interesting enough to relate here.
Random thought: these marks above letters are called accents, and many native speakers of languages that use those marks have accents when they speak English. Weird right?
