[B-Greek] accents

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Nov 19 16:45:31 EST 2003


At 9:38 PM +0000 11/19/03, Ranulf Doswell wrote:
>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.

The word ESTIN is more frequently than not enclitic; it is accented on the
penult (e.g. E/STIN) ordinarily only when the verb is used in an
existential sense rather than as a copula.

>>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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-- 

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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