Hello, this is my first post. My apologies if this has been posted before. It’s a very basic question.
I’m struggling to apply the rules of accent, and reconcile them with verb forms. As I understand it, no acute accent may occur on the antepenult.
Why then does the fifth form of certain verbs flout this convention? For example: κεκέλευσμαι, λέλυμαι.
Thanks for any input. This is really barring my progress!
The rule is that the accent may fall on the antepenult if the ultima is short. While αι is long it does sometime count as short so I assume that is what is happening here.
EDIT
A final αι always counts as short unless it is opatitive.
Aha. Thank you!
Brief follow up question: when an accent falls on a dipthong such as “eú”, does one literally pronounce it as “eú”, or rather “eú”?
A fraught question.
The modern Greeks use a stress accent, and they stress the entire syllable. There is no distinction between the circumflex or the acute. This is certainly the easiest way for a foreign language speaker to accent Greek.
At some time in the past the Greek language switched from a pitch to stress accent and lost vowel length. It is generally thought that these two phenomenon occurred at the same time, and that may be a reasonable guess, although pitch accents seem to come and go in various language groups for all sorts of reasons.
If you are going to speak ancient Greek aloud, the most important thing by far is getting vowel length correct – this is my opinion – and you can still use a stress accent. Just accent the entire syllable.
If you decide to make the multi-year and likely futile journey involved in attempting a pitch accent along with vowel length (and you can check out my YouTube channel for where I’m at on in after 2 years), then yes, the pitch varies depending on what part of the diphthong you are at. You have to break up the word by mora.
Won’t the accent be the same as with a long monophthong? It’s a single syllable, after all.
(It’s just a modern spelling convention to place the accent on the second vowel.)
Won’t the accent be the same as with a long monophthong? It’s a single syllable, after all.
It’s the same as for a monophthong, yes. But the point about syllables isn’t actually persuasive. The syllable is the basic sound unit of modern Greek or English, but the basic unit of ancient Greek was the mora – according to Allen and Sommerstein and others. Both long vowels and diphthongs are two mora – like in modern Japanese.
(It’s just a modern spelling convention to place the accent on the second vowel.)
If I were going to argue against a modern convention, it would be the convention of making a circumflex a single character in length. It should cover the entire diphthong, as it does in the manuscripts.
Given that a circumflex is a high pitch followed by a svarita on the same syllable (but in fact the next mora), placing the acute on the first vowel (mora) of the diphthong would be perverse.
Both long vowels and diphthongs are two mora
That was my point, more or less, only I didn’t see the need to introduce chiasmus_a to new technical terms. I simply wanted to answer his question in a non-confusing way.
Plural of mora is morae, btw.
Plural of mora is morae, btw.
My complete lack of Latin. I always assumed that the word was Japanese.
Thank you again for the answer.
The digression into some of the complexities surrounding accent was very intriguing. Sounds like an interesting project you have there.