[B-Greek] Question about accent marks in BBG

Matthew Blair mpblair at gmail.com
Mon Dec 31 13:49:24 EST 2007


Thank you; your explanation was most helpful!

Sincerely,

Matthew

On Dec 31, 2007 12:50 PM, Carl W. Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:

> 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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