[B-Greek] IWTA -- long or short?

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Sep 19 06:26:48 EDT 2003


At 10:03 PM -0300 9/18/03, Brent Hudson wrote:
>I had a student ask how to tell if an IWTA is long or short.  The best I
>could do on the spot is say that if it has a circumflex then it is long
>(Smyth 4).  Do I just tell this person that unless they want to memorize
>200+ accent rules they will need to get used the angst of ambiguity?
>
>I have looked through Smyth and Mounce's Morphology and several other
>grammars that I have on my shelf and I have not been able to locate any
>"rule of thumb" for determining the length of the iota.  While Smyth is
>good at marking the long iota with a macron, LSJ isn't and so looking up
>suspect words is not easy or even possible in many instances.  Any help on
>this one would be appreciated?

I've seen Barry Hofstetter's response to this and I agree that finding an
iota that must be scanned long in verse is the surest bet, but (a) I think
that a long iota is relatively rare (perhaps when it's a result of
contraction and in some proper names), and (b) I think long iota's ARE
marked in LSJ but not short iotas; e.g. it is marked in hIMEROS, "desire."
-- 

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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