[B-Greek] Are accents important?
J. Ted Blakley
jtb1 at st-andrews.ac.uk
Mon Jun 14 07:10:34 EDT 2004
David,
Here are just a couple of thoughts in response to your question. I
haven't thought through the issue in any systematic way and my initial
response would be that I think an answer to your question depends a lot on
what your goals are with getting back into Greek, what you are hoping to do
with it and what sort of longterm plans you have on acquiring and
maintaining your Greek. I certainly wouldn't get bogged down in accents at
the beginning; that is, I would never let them inhibit your acquiring Greek.
That being said, I wouldn't ignore them either. Some words for instance have
different meanings depending upon their accents; or said in a better way,
some words are distinguished from one another by their accents, as in the
case of POY with an accute (adverb meaning somewhere) and POY with a
circumflex (interrogative adverb meaning where?). Also sometimes accents
give you clues into the particular form of a word, e.g., a circumflex accent
is one of the distinguishing features of an aorist passive subjunctive
(although not the most distinguishing feature).
Another way of approaching your question would be to recognize that
there are different levels of knowing. I would say that in acquiring or
re-acquiring Greek it is not necessary to try to learn the rules/patterns of
accents in an active sense, that is, to have the ability to be able to know
the rules well enough that you can write words and know which accents go
where. I would think that a passive level of understanding would be
sufficient, that is, that when you come across words, that the accents make
sense to you. What I am doing a poor job of articulating here is the same
difference that linguists talk about between an active and passive
vocabulary. A passive vocabulary are the words you can recognize the meaning
of though you couldn't produce them yourself from memory, while an active
vocabulary includes the words that you can actually produce yourself. So if
you see LOGOS and recall that it means "word" but were unable to recall
LOGOS if someone were to ask you what the Greek is for "word" then LOGOS
would fit into your passive vocabulary.
So, in the end, my advice would be to acquire a passive understanding of
accents as you are re-acquiring your Greek. The practical steps I would take
would be the following. (1) Learn some of the basic rules/patterns for
accents. I would expect that most introductory Greek grammars have a page or
two on this topic. I have found pp. 4-7 in Hewett's *New Testament Greek*
grammar quite helpful. By basic I mean things like, accents only occur on
one of the last three syllables, a grave accent occurs only on the last
syllable of a word followed by another word, and the basic difference
between how accents act on nouns vs. verbs. (2) With these basic patterns in
mind, as you learn Greek, as you learn vocabulary, learn declensions and
conjugations, and as you read, just notice how the accents follow these
basic patterns (and notice when they don't). I think that once you are
familiar with the basic rules and you simply pay attention to accents as you
do your other learning (again not focusing upon accents and getting bogged
down, just noticing them), then as you are acquiring everthing else you will
acquire a useful level of understanding on accents.
If at some point you are ever interested in pursuing accents further,
the best resource that I know is D. A. Carson's Greek Accents: A Student's
Manual (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1985). It is a wonderful little book and
designed for taking you through step-by-step all of the patterns of accents.
He also has a couple of pages on the general rules of accent (pp. 19-20).
Hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Ted
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Mullens" <david.mullens at gmail.com>
To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 4:33 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] Are accents important?
> Hi,
>
> I took Greek about 15 years ago. I'm trying to 're-learn' it again.
> I remember quite a bit of it, but I want to know it better. One thing
> that wasn't covered very well in my courses was accents. Now, I'm
> wondering if it is important to know the rules on accents or if it is
> something I can basically skip.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Dave.
> ---
> B-Greek home page: http://metalab.unc.edu/bgreek
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