[B-Greek] accents

Ranulf Doswell bgreek at ranulf.net
Wed Nov 19 16:38:40 EST 2003


Ted Shoemaker wrote:

> Today I noticed *four* different ways of accenting the
> word ESTIN, found in 1 John 5:11 and 5:17:
>      acute accent on last syllable
>      grave accent on last syllable
>      accent on first syllable
>      no accent

The usual accentuation is with an acute on the last syllable, ESTI/N. If
this accent is directly followed by another word, it becomes a grave, hence
v11a is a grave, whereas v17a is an acute because it is directly followed by
punctuation.

The only reason I could think of ESTIN loosing its accent altogether is if
it were enclitic, MBG says that "if a word preceding an enclitic has a
circumflex on the ultima, then ... normally looses their accent". This would
explain v11b if estin was enclitic.

>From this idea, I did a quick search, and in fact it looks like this has
come up on B-Greek before.
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2000-February/009879.html
mentions that the enclitic form is emphatic and accented E/STIN.

Also see
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2000-February/009881.html and
Carl's very detailed
http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/test-archives/html4/2000-02/35367.html

Also, take a look at Rod Decker's article on enclitics:
http://faculty.bbc.edu/RDecker/documents/enclitics.pdf

Cheers,

Ranulf
Coventry, UK




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