The Ancient Greek accent was a melodic or pitch accent.
In Ancient Greek, one of the final three syllables of each word carries an accent. Each syllable contains a vowel with one or two vocalic morae, and one mora in a word is accented; the accented mora is pronounced at a higher pitch than other morae.
The accent cannot come more than three syllables from the end of the word. If the last syllable of a word has a long vowel, or is closed by two consonants, the accent usually cannot come on the antepenultimate syllable; but within those restrictions it is free.
In nouns the accent is largely unpredictable. Mostly the accent either comes as close to the beginning of the word as the rules allow, for example, 'war' (such words are said to have recessive accent), or it is placed on the last mora of the word, as in 'river' (such words are called oxytone). But in a few words, such as 'maiden', the accent comes between these two extremes.
In verbs the accent is generally predictable and has a grammatical rather than a lexical function, that is, it differentiates different parts of the verb rather than distinguishing one verb from another. Finite parts of the verb usually have recessive accent, but in some tenses participles, infinitives, and imperatives are non-recessive.
In the classical period (5th–4th century BC) word accents were not indicated in writing, but from the 2nd century BC onwards various diacritic marks were invented, including an acute, circumflex, and grave accent, which indicated a high pitch, a falling pitch, and a low or semi-low pitch respectively. The written accents were used only sporadically at first, and did not come into common use until after 600 AD.
The fragments of ancient Greek music that survive, especially the two hymns inscribed on a stone in Delphi in the 2nd century BC, appear to follow the accents of the words very closely, and can be used to provide evidence for how the accent was pronounced.
Sometime between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD the distinction between acute, grave, and circumflex disappeared and all three accents came to be pronounced as a stress accent, generally heard on the same syllable as the pitch accent in ancient Greek.
Types of accent The ancient Greek grammarians indicated the word-accent with three diacritic signs: the acute (ά), the circumflex (ᾶ), and the grave (ὰ).
Acute The acute was the most commonly used of these; it could be found on any of the last three syllables of a word. Some examples are: 'man, person' 'citizen' 'good'
Circumflex The circumflex, which represented a rising and then falling tone, is found only on long vowels, diphthongs and the digraph epsilon-iota, and only on the last two syllables of the word: 'body' 'earth'
When a circumflex appears on the final syllable of a polysyllabic word, it usually represents a contracted vowel: 'I do' (contracted form of )
Grave The grave is found, as an alternative to an acute, only on the last syllable of a word.
When a word such as 'good' with final accent is followed by a pause (that is, whenever it comes at the end of a clause, sentence, or line of verse), or by an enclitic word such as the weak form of 'is' (see below), the accent is written as an acute: '[a] good man' '[he] is [a] good man'
However, when the word does not come before a pause or an enclitic, the acute accent is replaced by a grave: 'a good person'
It is generally assumed that when a word was written with a grave it indicates that there was no rise in pitch, or only a small one.
Terminology In all there are five different possibilities for placing an accent. The terms used by the ancient Greek grammarians were: Oxytone (): acute on the final syllable (e.g. 'father') Paroxytone (): acute on the penultimate (e.g. 'mother') Proparoxytone (): acute on the antepenultimate (e.g. 'person') Perispomenon (): circumflex on the final (e.g. 'I see') Properispomenon (): circumflex on the penultimate (e.g. 'body')
The word barytone () refers to any word which has no accent (either acute or circumflex) on the final syllable, that is the 2nd, 3rd and 5th possibilities above.
Placing the accent marks In Greek, if an accent mark is written on a diphthong or vowel written with a digraph such as , it is always written above the second vowel of the diphthong, not the first, for example: 'for the sailors' 'one'
When a word such as a proper name starts with a capital vowel letter, the accent and breathing are usually written before the letter. If a name starts with a diphthong, the accent is written above the second letter. But in 'Hades', where the diphthong is the equivalent of an alpha with iota subscript (i.e. ), it is written in front: 'Hera' 'Ajax' 'Hades'
When combined with a rough or smooth breathing, the circumflex goes on top of the breathing, while the acute or grave is written to the right of the breathing, as in the above examples. When an accent is combined with a diaeresis mark, as in , the accent is written on top.
Tonal minimal pairs
Whether the accent on a particular syllable is an acute or circumflex is largely predictable, but there are a few examples where a change from an acute on a long vowel to a circumflex indicates a different meaning, for example 'he might free' – 'to free' 'at home' – 'houses' 'man' (poetic) – 'light'
There are also examples where the meaning changes if the accent moves to a different syllable: 'I remain' – 'I will remain' 'I persuade' – 'persuasion' 'make!' (middle imperative) – 'he might make' – 'to make' 'ten thousand' – 'countless' 'law' – 'place of pasturage' 'Athenaeus' (proper name) – 'Athenian'
There is also a distinction between unaccented (or grave-accented) and fully accented forms in words such as: 'someone' – 'who?' 'somewhere' / 'I suppose' – 'where?' 'or' / 'than' – 'in truth' / 'I was' / 'he said' 'but' – 'others (neuter)' 'it is' – 'there is' / 'it exists' / 'it is possible'
History of the accent in Greek writing
The three marks used to indicate accent in ancient Greek, the acute (´), circumflex (῀), and grave (`) are said to have been invented by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, who was head of the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt in the early 2nd century BC. The first papyri with accent marks date from this time also. In the papyri, at first the accents were used only sporadically, specifically for helping readers to pronounce Greek poetry correctly, and the grave accent could be used on any non-accented syllable. Such accents were useful, since Greek at that time was written without gaps between the words. For example, in one papyrus, the word 'to brass' is written with grave accents on the first two syllables, in case any reader should mistakenly read the first part of the word as 'to a mountain'.
In subsequent centuries many other grammarians wrote about Greek accentuation. The most famous of these, Aelius Herodianus or Herodian, who lived and taught in Rome in the 2nd century AD, wrote a long treatise in twenty books, 19 of which were devoted to accentuation. Although Herodian's book does not survive in full, an epitome (abridgement) was made of it around AD 400 which still survives. Another important authority was Apollonius Dyscolus, the father of Herodian.
The names of these diacritics in English, and the term "accent", are based on Latin loan-translations of the Greek terms. Latin corresponds to Greek "song sung to instrumental music, pitch variation in voice" (the word from which English prosody comes), to "sharp" or "high-pitched", to "heavy" or "low-pitched", and to "pulled around" or "bent". The Greek terms for the diacritics are nominalized feminine adjectives that originally modified the feminine noun and agreed with it in gender.
Diacritic signs were not used in the classical period (5th–4th century BC). They were gradually introduced from the 2nd century BC onwards, but did not become commonly used in manuscripts until after 600 AD.
Origin of the accent
The ancient Greek accent, at least in nouns, appears to have been inherited to a large extent from the original parent language from which Greek and many other European and Indian languages derive, Proto-Indo-European. This can be seen by comparing the accent of Greek words with the accent of words in the Vedic hymns (the most ancient form of the Sanskrit language of India). Very often these are the same, for example:; cf. . Vedic , Ancient Greek 'foot' (nominative) Vedic , Ancient Greek 'foot' (accusative) Vedic , Ancient Greek 'of a foot' (genitive) Vedic , Ancient Greek 'for a foot' (dative)
There are also other accentual correspondences between Greek and Vedic, for example: Vedic , Ancient Greek 'yoke' Vedic , Ancient Greek 'horse' Vedic , Ancient Greek 'a hundred' Vedic , Ancient Greek 'new' Vedic , Ancient Greek 'father'
One difference between Greek and Vedic, however, is that in Greek words the accent is always found in one of the last three syllables, whereas in Vedic (and presumably in Proto-Indo-European) it could come anywhere in the word.
The distinction in Greek between circumflex and acute accent appears to be a Greek development, and does not go back to Proto-Indo-European.
Pronunciation of the accent General evidence It is generally agreed that the ancient Greek accent was primarily one of pitch or melody rather than of stress.; . Thus in a word like 'man', the first syllable was pronounced on a higher pitch than the others, but not necessarily any louder. As long ago as the 19th century it was surmised that in a word with recessive accent the pitch may have fallen not suddenly but gradually in a sequence high–middle–low, with the final element always short.James Hadley attributes the idea to Franz Misteli; cf. ; .
The evidence for this comes from various sources. The first is the statements of Greek grammarians, who consistently describe the accent in musical terms, using words such as 'high-pitched' and 'low-pitched'.
According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century BC), the melody of speech is confined to an interval 'of about a 5th'. This statement has been interpreted in different ways, but it is usually supposed that he meant not that it was always a fifth, but that this was the maximum normal difference between high and low syllables. It is thought probable that occasionally, especially at the end of a sentence, the interval was much smaller.; Dionysius also describes how a circumflex accent combines high and low pitch on the same syllable, whereas with an acute accent the high and low pitches are in separate syllables.
Another indication that the accent was melodic or tonal is that in the classical period the accents of the words seem to have played no part at all in poetic metres, unlike in languages such as English which have stress-accents. It was not until the 4th century AD that poems began to be written in which the accent played a role (see below).
Evidence from music An important indication of the melodic nature of the Greek accent comes from the surviving pieces of Greek music, especially the two Delphic hymns (2nd century BC), the Seikilos epitaph (1st century AD), and the hymns of Mesomedes (2nd century AD). An example is the prayer to Calliope and Apollo written by Mesomedes, court musician to the Emperor Hadrian:
(Further examples of ancient Greek music can be found in the articles Delphic Hymns and Mesomedes.)
As can be seen, the accented syllable of a word generally has the highest note within that word, although sometimes the syllables preceding or following the accent are also high.