Acute accent  The acute accent, , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels. 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 (loan-translated) into Latin as "sharpened". The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages:  The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages. A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages. In Polish, such a mark is known as a () and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. "six"). However, in contrast to the which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet . However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance. In Serbo-Croatian, as in Polish, the letter is used to represent a palatalized . In the romanization of Macedonian, and represent the Cyrillic letters (Gje) and (Kje), which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though and (or and ) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto-Indo-European phonemes and . Sorbian uses the acute for palatalization as in Polish: . Lower Sorbian also uses , and Lower Sorbian previously used and , also written as ; these are now spelt as and . In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyin romanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofo semi-syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising tone.