[B-Greek] when the A is long?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Apr 23 13:42:12 EDT 2003


At 1:25 PM -0400 4/23/03, David Lew wrote:
>B-Greekers,
>
>    Could anyone tell me when the A is long and when short? Thanks.

This is not something that can be spelled out very readily; you really need
to check a lexicon to be sure. There are a few points that can be noted:
	1. Most first-declension nouns with A following on I, E, or R have
long alpha; in most other long-alpha first-declension nouns an original
long-alpha has changed to Eta; then there are a few (relatively few)
first-declension nouns with short-alpha stems that lengthen to Eta only in
the genitive and dative singular;
	2. All first-declension accusative plurals have long-alpha before
the -S ending (result of compensatory lengthening after loss of -N- between
A- and -S);
	3. All active participles with -A- before the -NT- participial sign
have long alpha in the nominative sg. (same reason as in #2 above) and have
long alpha in all feminine forms (e.g. LUSASA/LUSASHS/LUSASHI/LUSASAN etc.,
again for the same reason as in #2 above);
	4. Alpha contract verbs generally contract alpha + epsilon into
long alpha, and that's true even of the infinitive (AGAPA-E-EN --> AGAPAN);
	5. Apart from these and perhaps a couple other
morphologically-determined long-alphas, the quantity of an alpha is
something you can only check on in a lexicon.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/


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