[B-Greek] Question about accent marks in BBG

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Dec 31 12:45:42 EST 2007



On Monday, December 31, 2007, at 12:37PM, "Matthew Blair" <mpblair at gmail.com> wrote:
>Greetings all, and best wishes for a Happy New Year!
>
>I'm just starting out on a self-learning course of study, and I have a
>question about accent marks on the definite article.  In the paradigm, the
>accent mark on TON is acute; in example usage, the accent mark is grave.  I
>can think of a practical reason why the accent mark might be grave (because
>the following word would most likely have an acute mark, and so the sentence
>might flow better in the rise and fall of the pronunciation), but of course
>I do not know for sure.
>
>
>So the questions are:
>
>1) Is the accent mark represented correctly?

An acute accent on any final syllable becomes a grave if another word follows.

>2) If so, why is it acute in the one case and grave in the other?

An acute on a final syllable remains acute UNLESS there's a word following.

Properly speaking, there's no good reason to mark that accent on the acc. sg.
masculine article as acute at all; I can't think of any instance where it wouldn't 
be followed by another word. Paradigms are peculiar in that they show words
in forms in which they never appear otherwise -- for example, you will only see
uncontracted contract-verbs as the lemma in a dictionary and in the paradigms.
In speech and in writing [POIEW (?????)] is always POIW (????).

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)



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