Pharr, sec. 19a discusses accent shifts and circumflexes on verbs, but ex. 19b doesn't need this?

Greek Learning Greek
1

Pharr’s section 18 is his first presentation of a verb conjugation, λύω. Then 19a is an intricate discussion of rules about accents on nouns and verbs, how they move around, and when they have to be spelled using circumflexes. After that comes exercise 19b, in which he asks the student to pick three words from the immediately following vocabulary list, and conjugate them like λύω, in the present tense.

I’m wondering if I’m missing something, because it doesn’t seem that any of these rules could cause anything of interest to happen with these verbs. These are verbs whose dictionary forms end in unaccented -ω, not -άω or -ώ. For example, one of his verbs is ἁνδάνω. In the dictionary form, the accent behaves as you’d expect a verb’s accent to behave: it goes as far to the left as it can, but it can’t go on the first syllable, because ω is long. I could worry that in one of the other present-tense forms there would be an ending that was a short vowel, freeing the accent to move to the initial α, but that doesn’t seem to happen. I get this:

ἁνδάνω
ἁνδάνεις
ἁνδάνει
ἁνδάνομεν
ἁνδάνετε
ἁνδάνουσιν

In ἁνδάνεις and ἁνδάνει, it can’t move to the left because the diphthong ει is long. In the plural forms, it can’t move to the left, because the endings have two syllables.

Is there something I’m not understanding, or are these rules really not yet relevant?

2

It looks like you got it right. Accents can be pretty complicated but I suppose that Pharr wants you to start with basic patterns.

3

You’ve got John Wright’s revised version of Pharr, I think. Pharr didn’t actually embark on the accent rules here, and that may be why the exercises don’t quite match up.

I don’t recall exactly what it was, but I didn’t like something about Wright’s preface, and looked around for an old copy of Pharr’s 1959 edition, which is what I own.

4

Like Joel, I have the 1959 edition of Pharr. In that edition, Pharr’s discussion of accenting verbs is in section 902, which is referred to in section 548. Section 548 is part of the required reading for Lesson 2. Section 902 deals mostly with specific exceptions to the observation that the accent in verbs is recessive.

5

Thanks, all. I should have said that I have the 4th edition of Pharr.