[B-Greek] Re: Accents
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Nov 26 06:41:36 EST 2004
At 3:01 AM -0500 11/26/04, Richard Ghilardi wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I thought I'd give just one more example of an instance where accent is
>"very important".
>
>A/RA is a particle which marks a statement as an inference drawn from
>what precedes.
>
>A=RA is an interrogative particle introducing a direct question.
Not disagreeing with anything Richard has said but simply clarifying, for
those who may be unaware: precisely because the accentuation of MOST Greek
words does NOT really make a difference in our understanding them, we don't
normally indicate accentuation in our B-Greek transcriptions at all, but
when we do, we follow the scheme of "TLG Beta Code" (the coding used by
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae to mark up Greek texts in Roman alphabet to
indicate clearly the spelling and accentuation of the Greek characters). by
that convention, the ASCII characters "/", "\", and "=" represent acute
accent, grave accent and circumflex respectively. TLG Beta Code also uses
"(" and ")" respectively to represent rough breathing and smooth breathing.
Thus the two forms of ARA:
)A/RA (smooth-alpha acute-rho-alpha) is the interrogative particle;
)A=RA (smooth-alpha circumflexed-alpha) is the inferential particle.
--
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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