This is from Chambers: The Greek War of Independence
κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν τοῦ πολέμου τοῦδε νέμουσι τὴν χώραν οἵ τε Τοῦρκοι (κύριοι γάρ εἰσι τῆς γῆς) καὶ οἱ ἀπόγονοι τῶν παλαιῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ ξύμμεικτος ὄχλος τῶν ἐποίκων ·
I would have expected the οἵ of οἵ τε Τοῦρκοι to be οἱ like that of the other two. Is there something I’m missing or could it be a printers error?
My translation is:
At the time of the beginning of this war, the Turks (lords of the land), the descendants of the ancient Peloponnesians and a mixed mass of the immigrants shared the region.
So even though it looks like a relative pronoun it is an ordinary determiner. Thanks - that was something that I had completely missed so I’ve learned something new.
And the reason it does so is that τε is an enclitic, and so pronounced with the previous syllable of the word before it. That is represented by giving that syllable an accute accent where permitted, rules established by the scholastics in late antiquity/early medieval times.
The written accentual system was established well before late antiquity. Accents were being written in manuscripts as early as the 2nd cent. BCE and no doubt earlier. Herodian in the 2nd cent. CE wrote extensively about enclitics (and a 20-book work on Greek prosody as a whole), and recorded the rules we follow today.
