Why ἀθηναῖός ?

Greek Learning Greek
1

Been doing Latin awhile and finally decided to try and learn some Greek. Bought several popular books to try but in the end I narrowed it down to using either Athenaze or Reading Greek. The reason being they are story based so I figured that would make reviewing vocabulary extra easy, just listen to the stories and actively listen to keep the vocabulary fresh. The stories in Reading Greek seem more interesting than Athenaze but there is more repetition and recycling of vocabulary in Athenaze plus the grammar learning isn’t as aggressive in Athenaze so I thought cool I’ll just use that and maybe Reading Greek in the future. But then…

Then I started noticing lots of accenting in spots that don’t make sense to me but then again I’m a newbie. I started scanning through the whole book and all over the place in the stories I am seeing 2 accents on many words such as “ἀθηναῖός”.
Why is there an accent on the final “o” when there is already one on the αῖ ? Is this book full of typos? I went to Quizlet and noticed in many flashcards decks for Athenaze a lot of people weren’t putting an accent on the “o” but some were. If this book is full of typos then maybe I just use a different method. Or maybe I’m just a newbie and it belongs there sometimes? For reference I have both 2nd and 3rd editions and noticed this in both.

Any help appreciated :smiley: Are there any times words like ἀθηναῖος (or ἀθηναῖός ??) can have 2 different stress/pitch accents in the same word? I’m not confusing these accents with breathing marks, i-subscript or macrons btw.

Edit: Here is an example senence in the text:

,ὁ Δικαιόπολις Ἀθηναῖός ἐστιν·

2

In the case of ἀθηναῖός, the accute accent is probably due to a following enclitic word, such as τε or τις. The accenting rules of ancient Greek are somewhat complex, but not so hard when you get used to them.

3

Ahh so sometimes words can have multiple stress accents then? I knew about accent shifting to different syllables based on long and short vowels, etc. and how accents changed depending on the words around them. I just had never seen 2 stress accents on one word is all. Like I said though, I am a true noob. Thanks for the help :slightly_smiling_face:

Edit: one of the sentences in question:

ὁ Δικαιόπολις Ἀθηναῖός ἐστιν·

4

Here is a webpage which someone posted here some time ago that explains the rules of accents:

https://antigonejournal.com/2021/06/greek-accents-ten-rules/

Rule no. 10 is the one explaining enclitics, where words may have two accents. And just to be precise, the ancient Greek accents are not stress accents, but pitch accents. This is also explained in the webpage.

5

Thanks much! :sunglasses: It’s lovely being a newb all over again :laughing:

6

By the time Koine was around there were no pitch accents anymore, or so I’m told, and they were only used as stress accents. In Koine then when there is a double accented word does one put a stress on both the accented syllables ?

7

All of this is explained in Reading Greek very early on. I am using it with a beginners class and it is well liked as a text.

8

Thanks! I might just switch to that since I already have the texts.