Accentuation

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Ray Harder
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Joined: January 16th, 2014, 8:09 pm

Accentuation

Post by Ray Harder »

It’s been 30 years since I took Greek and I am disabled and had to sell my 8,000 volume library which included every major grammar of Greek. Recently, my 7 year old grandson showed an interest in learning Greek so we Skype weekly and I am teaching him Koine. There are numerous decent texts online of the NT itself. The vocabulary, syntax, and morphology are fairly simple for me to recall and I find many online charts etc., but the rules of accentuation completely elude me. I seem to recall a basic set of rules learned in the first week of class for how to choose an acute, grave, or circumflex and whether it goes over the ultima, the penult, or the antepenult. I don’t find the rules anywhere online and they are skipped with a dismissive sentence in A.T. Robertson’s grammar which I found in Google Books. I downloaded a few charts declined in the second declension, but without accents. I have tried to interpolate the rules from examples in the NT. I cannot come up with a set of rules that work for all the examples I find in the NT.

When I look at the word ἄνθρωπος, I find the following:
From http://www.greekbible.com/ I construct the following:

ἄνθρωπος Matt. 4:4
ἀνθρώπου Matt. 8:20
ἄνθρωπῳ Not found. Not sure of accent.
ἄνθρωπον Matt. 9:9
ἄνθρωπε Not found. Not sure of accent.
ἄνθρωποι Matt. 7:12
ἀνθρώπων Matt. 4:9
ἀνθρώποις Matt. 6:5
ἀνθρώπους Matt. 5:19
ἄνθρωποι Not found. Not sure of accent. Same morphology as nominative plural. Likely the same accentuation.


I seem to recall the rules as something like: 1.) move the accent as close to the antepenult as the rules allow, 2.) long syllables in the ultima pull the accent away from the antepenult, 3.) circumflex over long syllables. These are definitely not the rules and I don’t recall any rules for when to use an acute and when to use grave. With the examples of ἄνθρωπος that I find in the NT, I can’t seem to figure out a set of rules that explain all the forms. Anyone know an internet site listing these rules? Anyone ever type them up for students who would be willing to paste them here? Do these rules exist? Or have I created a vague and false memory?
MAubrey
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Re: Accentuation

Post by MAubrey »

I would recommend: D. A. Carson's book: Greek Accents: A Student's Manual. It's concise and helpful and will cover most of what you're looking for.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
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Louis L Sorenson
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Re: Accentuation

Post by Louis L Sorenson »

Ray,

Welcome to B-Greek. Hope you've been lurking around for a long time. You can find your answer online at Smyth's A Greek Grammar http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phi ... nographs.9. Specifically, §149 ff. http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/phi ... Monographs. A simpler explanation can be found in Funk's grammar, which we host online at http://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/project/f ... son-3.html.
Ray Harder
Posts: 3
Joined: January 16th, 2014, 8:09 pm

Re: Accentuation

Post by Ray Harder »

Thank you to those who replied. Doing a Google search for "classical greek accent rules" yielded the following results which vary in degrees of helpfulness and accuracy:
http://www.chioulaoshi.org/BG/Paradigms/accents.html
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ancgreek/ ... tionU.html
http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/poz ... /ee7.3.htm
http://ntresources.com/blog/?p=1236
Ray Harder
Posts: 3
Joined: January 16th, 2014, 8:09 pm

Re: Accentuation

Post by Ray Harder »

I believe the proper accentuation of anthropos in the second declension would be:
ἄνθρωπος Matt. 4:4
Accent remains on antepenult because ultima is short.This is the lexical form.

ἀνθρώπου Matt. 8:20
Acute moves to penult because ultima is long.

ἀνθρώπῳ
Acute moves to penult because ultima is long.

ἄνθρωπον Matt. 9:9
Accent remains on antepenult because ultima is short.

ἄνθρωπε
Accent remains on antepenult because ultima is short.

ἄνθρωποι Matt. 7:12
Accent remains on antepenult because final diphthong is considered short without final sigma

ἀνθρώπων Matt. 4:9
Acute moves to penult because ultima is long

ἀνθρώποις Matt. 6:5
Acute moves to penult because ultima is long (final οι with sigma).

ἀνθρώπους Matt. 5:19
Acute moves to penult because ultima is long

ἄνθρωποι Accent remains on antepenult because final diphthong οι is considered short without final sigma
Shirley Rollinson
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Re: Accentuation

Post by Shirley Rollinson »

The dreaded Wikipedia gives a concise account of Greek accentuation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_accent
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