Breathings, Accents and Punctuation

Printed Greek is full of small marks above and beside the letters. They look fussy, and beginners are tempted to ignore them. Do not. One mark tells you whether a word starts with an h. Others tell you which syllable is sung higher. A breathing or an accent can be the only thing that separates two different words, and the question mark is a symbol you would never guess.

The marks are later than the texts. Smyth (section 161) says the accent signs are credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of the library at Alexandria around 200 BC, and that they were not used regularly in manuscripts until after 600 AD. Plato never wrote one. But they record real features of ancient speech, and every modern edition and dictionary uses them, so you need to read and write them.

Breathings

Every Greek word that begins with a vowel or a diphthong carries a breathing mark (Smyth, section 9).

Smyth uses that same pair, ὅρος and ὄρος, to show that a breathing can be the only difference between two words. The rough breathing is the only way Greek writes the h sound. There is no letter for it.

Where breathings go

• On a single vowel: over a small letter, ἐν; before a capital, Ἀθῆναι.
• On a diphthong: over the second vowel, αἱρέω [hai-RE-ō] I take, αἴρω [AI-rō] I lift (Smyth, section 11). The exception is a long vowel with iota subscript, where the breathing goes on the first letter: ᾄδω [ĀI-dō] I sing.
• With an accent: the breathing comes before an acute or grave and under a circumflex: οἵ, ἤ, but ὦ, οὗτος (Smyth, section 153).

Three fixed rules

• Initial υ always has the rough breathing (Smyth, section 10): ὕδωρ [HÜ-dōr] water, ὑμεῖς [hü-MĒS] you.
• Initial ρ always has the rough breathing (Smyth, section 13): ῥήτωρ [HRĒ-tōr] speaker. That is why English writes "rhetoric" with rh.
• A breathing is not written in the middle of a compound word, even where an h was once heard (Smyth, section 12).

The rough breathing sign started life as half of the letter H, which in the old Attic alphabet stood for h (Smyth, section 14). Once Η became the vowel eta, writers used half of it, ⊢, for the h sound. That half-letter shrank into the hook you see today.

Accents mark pitch

In English, the accented syllable is louder and longer: PHOtograph, phoTOgraphy. Ancient Greek worked differently. The accented syllable was said on a higher note (Smyth, sections 150 and 151). The Greek word for accent, προσῳδία [pro-sōi-DI-ā], is literally "a song added to the words." Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in Rome in the first century BC, said the speaking voice rises and falls within about a musical fifth (On Literary Composition, chapter 11). Modern Greek uses stress, like English, and so does most Erasmian teaching. This course asks you to try pitch.

To practice, hum a low note for unaccented syllables and a note about a fifth higher for the acute. Do not make the syllable louder. For the circumflex, start high on the long vowel and slide down before the next syllable. It takes a week of reading aloud before it stops feeling odd. After that, the accent marks become a melody you can read.

The grave accent

The grave has one main job. An acute on the last syllable of a word changes to a grave when another word follows directly, with no punctuation between (Smyth, section 154). So καλός alone, but καλὸς λόγος. Before a period or the raised dot, it stays acute. In speech the grave probably meant the voice did not rise, or rose less.

Exceptions you will meet early: the question word τίς / τί (who? what?) never changes to grave, and an acute before an enclitic stays acute (Smyth, section 154 a). Both come up in lesson 4: τί ὄνομά σοι;

Where the accent can go

Greek has names for the last three syllables of a word: the ultima (last), the penult (second to last) and the antepenult (third to last). No accent can stand farther back than the antepenult (Smyth, section 149). Within that window, the length of the last syllable decides most things.

For accent purposes, a syllable is long if it has a long vowel or a diphthong. One exception matters right away: final -αι and -οι count as short for accent (Smyth, section 169), except in a verb form called the optative, which you will meet much later.

Read that table as a set of traffic rules (Smyth, sections 163 to 168):

• The antepenult can only take an acute, and only when the ultima is short.
• The circumflex needs a long vowel. It can stand on the ultima, or on the penult when the ultima is short.
• An accented long penult before a short ultima must be a circumflex: νῆσος [NĒ-sos] island, not νήσος. Before a long ultima it must be an acute: νήσου.

Names for words by their accent

Grammars and commentaries use these terms, and you will see them in dictionaries (Smyth, section 157).

Verbs: recessive accent

Verbs follow one simple principle. Their accent goes as far back toward the start of the word as the ultima allows (Smyth, sections 159 and 423). This is called recessive accent. You do not memorize verb accents. You work them out.

• λύω [LÜ-ō] I loosen: two syllables, long ultima. The farthest back the accent can go is the penult, and with a long ultima it must be an acute.
• λύομεν [LÜ-o-men] we loosen: short ultima, so the accent goes all the way to the antepenult.
• λύουσι [LÜ-oo-si] they loosen: short ultima, antepenult.
• παιδεύουσι [pai-DEU-oo-si] they teach: short ultima, antepenult, which here is the syllable -δευ-.

The main exceptions are small words that lean on their neighbor, the enclitics, including most forms of εἰμί (I am) and φημί (I say) (Smyth, section 424). Lesson 8 shows them.

Nouns: persistent accent

Nouns and adjectives behave differently. Their accent tries to stay on the same syllable it has in the nominative singular, the dictionary form, and moves only when the rules force it (Smyth, section 205). This is called persistent accent. So for nouns you learn the accent of the dictionary form, and the rules give you the rest.

Two special rules apply to the first and second declensions (lessons 5 and 6). Nouns that have an acute on the ultima switch to a circumflex in the genitive and dative: θεός, θεοῦ, θεῷ (Smyth, section 207). And every first-declension noun has a circumflex on the ending of the genitive plural: θάλαττα, θαλαττῶν (Smyth, section 208). You will see these in the tables.

Words with no accent and words that lean

A few very short words carry no accent and lean forward onto the next word. They are called proclitics. The common ones are ὁ, ἡ, οἱ, αἱ (forms of "the"), ἐν (in), εἰς (into), ἐκ / ἐξ (out of), εἰ (if), ὡς (as) and οὐ (not) (Smyth, section 179). οὐ gets an accent when it stands alone as "no!" or at the end of a sentence: οὔ.

Other short words lean backward onto the word before. These enclitics usually lose their accent and sometimes throw an extra one onto the word before them (Smyth, sections 181 to 183). Examples: μοι (to me), σοι (to you), τις (someone), and the forms ἐστί and εἰσί of "to be." The full rules are fiddly and you do not need them yet. One pattern is worth knowing now, because it appears in lesson 4: a word with an acute on the antepenult adds a second acute on its ultima before an enclitic. So ὄνομα (name) plus σοι (to you) is written ὄνομά σοι.

Other marks

• Apostrophe (elision): a short final vowel is often dropped before a word beginning with a vowel, and the gap is marked with an apostrophe: ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ for ἀπὸ αὐτοῦ. If the next word has a rough breathing, π, τ, κ become φ, θ, χ: ἀφ᾽ οὗ (Smyth, section 124). Lesson 11 covers this with prepositions.
• Diaeresis: two dots over ι or υ mean the vowel does not form a diphthong with the one before it: προΐστημι [pro-IS-tē-mi] (Smyth, section 8).
• Coronis: a mark like a smooth breathing in the middle of a word shows that two words have merged. κἀγώ is καὶ ἐγώ, "and I."

Punctuation

Greek has four punctuation marks (Smyth, section 188).

The question mark is the one that trips people up. A Greek sentence ending in ; is a question. Greek has no separate exclamation mark in classical texts, and many editions do not use quotation marks. Speeches are often marked only by a capital letter at the start.