It is helpful, then, that Greek accents are written out before our very eyes: they stand above the vowels that form the heart of every syllable. Thomas Warton’s ill-fated Oxford Theocritus (1770), which tried printing Greek without smooth breathings or accents, alongside Heinrich Ahrens’ Teubner edition (Leipzig, 1855). And if you saw the letters παιδευσαι, you would naturally want to know whether the intended intonation was παίδευσαι (“get (someone) educated”), παιδεύσαι (“he/she should educate”) or παιδεῦσαι (“to educate”). Changes in pitch could change meaning: the word for “houses” was οἶκοι, with a rise and fall in pitch on the first syllable but if you only raised the pitch on that first syllable – οἴκοι – you instead expressed the sense “at home”. Over time, Ancient Greek evolved so as to have a stress accent, although signs of this do not start appearing until the 2 nd century AD. the voice was raised and lowered on particular syllables. In Mandarin, 麻 má with a rising tone means “cannabis”, but 马 mǎ, with a fall and then rise in pitch means “horse”. Ancient Greek modulated not its stress but its tonal pitch: as in Punjabi or Mandarin Chinese, In Punjabi, ਕਰ kar is “do”, but the same sound with a falling pitch is ਘਰ kàr (“house”), and with a rising pitch ਕਰ੍ਹ kár (“dandruff”). Unlike languages such as English, Hungarian or Latin, which have a stress accent that raises the volume and emphasis on particular syllables, The rules for English stress are very complex ( doable, hairdo, a do?!), in Latin they are pretty simple ( a mātus and co rōna, but rē gĭus and fun dĕre, more on this at p.2 here), and in Hungarian they are even simpler (the first syllable: egészségedre! “cheers!”, vis zontlátásra “goodbye”). OK, this is one of 26 footnotes…īefore we come to them, let us set out some simple truths. So, if you are a reader of Greek texts and are still to get full control of these diacritical marks, Antigone offers you this ( relatively) short list of ten rules.

But this need not be so: while these strange squiggles seem baffling at first view, they are in reality quite well behaved. Just like the Furies, Ancient Greek accents have been known to drive students mad because of their apparent complexity.

Pronounce a accent grave