Diagramming Greek Accent Placement

7th November 2016 / by James Tauber

Cleaning up code as part of another bug fix to greek-accentuation led me to update an old diagram I’d done showing the Greek accentuation possibilities in terms of morae.

Back in 2014 I came up with the following diagram to try to explain that the “law of limitation” was fairly easy to understand in terms of morae. Once you understand the acute and circumflex accents in terms of morae, it’s clear that the accent can just go on one of the final three morae but that if the penult is long and the ultima short, the next-to-last mora is skipped over.

In trying to fix a bug in greek-accentuation, I was stepping through all the possibilities again (with the additional complexity that the code there sometimes can’t tell if a vowel is long or short). I realised it might be clearer to put the four combinations of penult/ultima length in a 2-by-2 matrix.

I added a bit more information on the resulting accents and came up with this:

Let me know what you think. Do other people find this a helpful way to conceptualise things visually?

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J. K. Tauber

at the intersection of computing, linguistics, philology, and learning science

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By day I’m an entrepreneur, web technologist and open-source developer but my academic background is in linguistics (along with some classics, comparative philology, and educational statistics) and my main avocation is working on text, annotations, analysis and software relating to historical languages with a particular interest in facilitating better learning.

While my focus has mostly been on Biblical Greek, much of the work is highly relevant to other Hellenistic Greek texts, other dialects of Ancient Greek and, indeed, texts in completely different languages as well.

All code written for this endeavour is open source and text and data is made available under a Creative Commons license to the extent allowed by the sources used.

I can be contacted at jtauber@jtauber.com.

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