More on Accents

Greek accenting is complex - D. A. Carson wrote a 167-page book called Greek Accents: A Student's Manual (which I own but haven't fully read or studied), and his summary of the various accent rules takes nearly 5 full pages. We never spent much time on accent rules in my Greek classes; whether that was good or bad, I don't know.

There are English-to-Greek exercises in this course, but for the most part, students want to learn to read Greek and translate it into English, not vice-versa, and the Greek they're reading will already have the accents. Thus, learning all the minutiae of accent rules (which involves knowing whether a vowel - and hence a syllable - is long or short) is probably something that most will not need to do.

The General Rules of Accent
(from Greek Accents: A Student's Manual, by D. A. Carson)

GR.1 Apart from specific exceptions later to be enumerated (largely concerning enclitics and proclitics, but also related to crasis and elision), every Greek word must have an accent, and only one accent.

GR.2 An acute accent may stand only on an ultima, a penult, or an antepenult; a circumflex accent may stand only on an ultima or a penult; and a grave accent may stand only on an ultima.

GR.3 The circumflex accent cannot stand on a short syllable.

GR.4 If the ultima is long, then:

• GR.4.1 the antepenult cannot have any accent, and


• GR.4.2 the penult, if it is accented at all, must have the acute.

GR.5 If the ultima is short, then a long penult, if it is accented at all, must have the circumflex accent.

GR.6 An acute accent on the ultima of a word is changed to a grave when followed, without intervening mark of punctuation, by another word or words.

You should recognize the above as having been listed by Croy in Lesson 1, and Croy gives additional accent rules in succeeding chapters. Carson's General Rules 4. and 5. are probably the most important, per a personal response from David H. Warren (Prof. of NT and Greek, Freed-Hardeman University, Henderson, Tenn.) to my B-Greek query regarding the importance of accents. (Though his online response to me that you can read below might seem a bit sarcastic - probably because he misunderstood what I was asking - his personal response was nice and helpful.) If you want to read that discussion, my initial post was here in the May 2002 archives:

value of accents? Eric Weiss

and the responses can be read in the June 2002 archives as follows:

value of accents? dhwarren at attglobal.net
value of accents? James Forsyth
value of accents? Eric S. Weiss
value of accents dhwarren at attglobal.net
value of accents? Vincent M. Setterholm
value of accents? Eric S. Weiss
value of accents Eric S. Weiss
value of accents? David Thiele

Some terms that you may encounter in other books:

Acute accents:
oxytone: an acute accent on the ultima (from οξεια "sharp")
paroxytone: an acute accent on the penult
proparoxytone: an acute accent on the antepenult

Circumflex accents:
perispomenon: a circumflex accent on the ultima (from περισπωμενη "drawn off from around, stripped off")
properispomenon: a circumflex accent on the penult

Also:
barytone: a word with no accent (from βαρεια "heavy")

Per Carson, in modern usage, the word, not the accented syllable, is called oxytone, perispomenon, barytone, etc., whereas with Greek literature, the accent itself is called οξεια, περισπωμενη, or βαρεια, and the noun προσωδια ("accent") is supplied: e.g., οξεια προσωδια.

A century ago Herbert Weir Smyth wrote what is still a standard and exhaustive grammar for Classical Greek. Per Carson, the accent rules for Hellenistic (i.e., New Testament) Greek differ somewhat from those for Classical Greek, but you might find Weir's ACCENT: GENERAL PRINCIPLES (sections 149-187) from the first edition helpful. (The second edition is still in print, and even though it's for Classical Greek, it is probably a book you'll want to acquire at some point if you're serious about learning Greek.)

The Website for Smyth's book uses a polytonic unicode font so you can see the correct accenting of the words I use in this post. I don't think Blogger displays polytonic Greek fonts, so I've been using unaccented unicode Greek characters. If you know how I can type and display unicode fonts with the full Greek character set, including all accents, breathing marks, iota subscript, etc., in this blog so students will see them instead of square boxes in their place, please let me know!