[B-Greek] Fwd: Re: Question about accent marks in BBG
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Dec 31 12:50:50 EST 2007
Sorry about that; I just realized why my web mail was not showing Unicode Greek.
I hope I've made the proper correction.
Carl Conrad
Οn 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 (ποιέω)] is always POIW (ποιῶ).
>
>Carl W. Conrad
>Department of Classics, Washington University (ret)
>
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