I am a beginner in Greek and I do not understand how accentuation works. εἰμί gives in the infinitive present εἶναι. Why do we sometimes read εἶναί, like in the following sentence?
«οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναί» ὁ Ἡ. φησι.
Hi, the answer is that you’re unfortunately looking at incorrectly accented Greek. It should be εἶναι, not εἶναί.
The only way it could have been εἶναί is if it had inherited an accent from a following enclitic word. Check out this handy intro to accents here, rule 10 (in particular the example they give in rule 10 of τοῦτό γε):
https://antigonejournal.com/2021/06/greek-accents-ten-rules/
In the quote you’re looking at however, εἶναι is not followed by an enclitic (it’s followed by ὁ, a proclitic). So it has been accented incorrectly.
I’m guessing this sentence was extracted from another environment where it originally did have a following enclitic (e.g. where φησι immediately followed the quote), but the accents weren’t updated after it was transplanted to its new environment: you often see this error in Greek outside edited texts.
Cheers, Chad
Thank you very much for the explanation!
Indeed I checked another source (https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%91%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%83%CF%80%CE%AC%CF%83%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1_(%CE%97%CF%81%CE%AC%CE%BA%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%B9%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82)#fragmentum_B_50) and this accent was not present. I have to find an authoritative source I can trust.