Jesse Goulet wrote:1) Although the grave accent marked a lower pitch or lack of pitch in earlier Greek, in the Koine period when accents had moved away from pitch to syllable stress, did the grave denote a LACK of stress or did it mark stress just like the acute and circumflex accents?
The evidence is very indirect for accentuation, but my understanding is that by the Koine period, the pitch accent and the stress accent coincided (much like English now), while earlier in the classical period they did not necessarily coincide.
Jesse Goulet wrote:In other words, by the Koine period, did ALL the accents denote stress or was it:
[*]acute = stress
[*]circumflex = stress
[*]grave = no stress?
These question seems important to figure especially when it comes to phrases where you have a bunch of words one by one that have grave accents--it sounds very monotone and awkward. I'm finding that sentence flow seems smoother when the grave accents are stressed.
It depends. The grave accent marks one of two things. It can mark a lowered acute accent in oxytone words (generally nouns and adjectives) or it can mark no accent at all, especially on monosyllabic function words. This is due to an orthographic convention that every word must bear a graphic accent, even though some lack it in the spoken language.
Jesse Goulet wrote:2) Are words with one syllable such as δέ, καί, τοῦ, τῷ, τῇ, ἤ, etc. stressed in context? After all, the purpose of stressing a syllable is so that particular syllable is highlighted from the rest of the syllables of that word, but obviously this would be redundant if a word has only one syllable.
Generally, none of these monosyllabic words were stressed, but rather they merged with a neighboring lexical word to form a prosodic word (or clitic group). For example, Acts 3:2 τὶς ἀνὴρ χωλὸς ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς αὐτοῦ ὑπάρχων ἐβαστάζετο, ὃν ἐτίθουν καθ' ἡμέραν πρὸς τὴν θύραν τοῦ ἱεροῦ would have been pronounced as if it read τισανὴρ χωλὸς ἐκκοιλίας μητρὸς αὐτοῦ ὑπάρχων ἐβαστάζετο ὃν ἐτίθουν καθημέραν προστηνθύραν τουϊερου.
The separation and independent graphic accentuation of these functional words and particles is a later orthographic development.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia