are: á, ä, é, è, ê, ë, í, î, ï, ó, ô, ö, ú, û, ü, ý. Diacritics are ignored when alphabetising, though they are still important, even when typing the diacritic forms may be difficult. For example, ("ate") instead of the 3 e's alongside each other: *, which can never occur in Afrikaans, or , which translates to "say", whereas is a possessive form. The acute's (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý) primary function is to place emphasis on a word (i.e. for emphatic reasons), by adding it to the emphasised syllable of the word. For example, sál ("will" (verb)), néé ('no'), móét ("must"), hý ("he"), gewéét ("knew"). The acute is only placed on the i if it is the only vowel in the emphasised word: wil ('want' (verb)) becomes wíl, but lui ('lazy') becomes lúi. Only a few non-loan words is spelled with acutes, e.g. dié ('this'), ná ('after'), óf ... óf ('either ... or'), nóg ... nóg ('neither ... nor'), etc. Only four non-loan words are spelled with the grave: ('yes?', 'right?', 'eh?'), ('here, take this!' or '[this is] yours!'), hè ('huh?', 'what?', 'eh?'), and appèl ('(formal) appeal' (noun)). Initial apostrophes A few short words in Afrikaans take initial apostrophes. In modern Afrikaans, these words are always written in lower case (except if the entire line is uppercase), and if they occur at the beginning of a sentence, the next word is capitalised. Three examples of such apostrophed words are . The last (the indefinite article) is the only apostrophed word that is common in modern written Afrikaans, since the other examples are shortened versions of other words ( and , respectively) and are rarely found outside of a poetic context. Here are a few examples: The apostrophe and the following letter are regarded as two separate characters, and are never written using a single glyph, although a single character variant of the indefinite article appears in Unicode, . Table of characters For more on the pronunciation of the letters below, see Help:IPA/Afrikaans. Afrikaans phrases Although there are many different dialects and accents, the transcription would be fairly standard. In the Dutch language the word means African, in the general sense. Consequently, Afrikaans is commonly denoted as . This ambiguity also exists in Afrikaans itself and is resolved either in the context of its usage, or by using in the adjective sense (e.g. Afrika-olifant for African elephant).