Re: Underlying Circumflex in Greek

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 16130
Date: 2002-10-10

--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:
> Peter was surely thinking of final accented syllables; that is the
only environment where Greek intonations can contrast. In paroxytones
the kind of accent on the penultimate syllable is non-contrastive,
being predictable from the quantity of the final: acute before a long
nucleus, circumflex before a short one (with minimal complications,
e.g. the endings -ai and -oi, -mai, -sai, -tai, -ntai count as
short). Mnemonically, this amounts to accenting the last-but-two
vocalic mora in this calss of words. In proparoxytones (words with
antepenultimate accent) the acute is obligatory, cf. <pneûma>
(= /pnéuma/): <pnematos> (= /pneúmatos/).

I find it easier to remember the 20th century rule that any morae
between the accented and final mora must be in the same syllable as
one another. I hadn't seen the supplementary rule, namely that the
accents do not contrast on non-final syllables, put so neatly. (The
anomalous short endings have to be memorised in either scheme.)

The infinitive of the second Aorist active (formally matching the
Sanskrit tudáti class) is then a good example - present infinitive
active <pheúgein> /pHeúgein/ v. aorist infinitive active
<phugeîn> /pHugéin/. I find it very hard to believe that the 2nd
aorist active infinitive is a contraction but that the present
infinitive active is not.

I presume Miguel will kick off the discussion of the circumflexes on
the endings of nouns with mobile accent in Instalment 14 of his
series on morphology.

Incidentally, does anyone know why the accents are written over the
second element of a diphthong rather than the stressed component?

Richard.