Preliminaries: language summary and review
Summary of the writing system
New terms
- diphthong
- iota subscript
- rough breathing, smooth breathing
- acute accent, grave accent, circumflex accent
- enclitic, proclitic
- ultima, penult, antepenult
The alphabet
- The classical Greek alphabet has 24 letters in a fixed sequence.
- With a few exceptions, each word in a Greek text has an accent.
- Each of the three possible accents can appear only in certain positions depending on the length of the vowels in the word.
Possible position of accents
Syllables in the following table are marked as – for long, ‿ for short, and × for a syllable that can be either long or short.
| Accented syllable | Syllable length | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Acute on antepenult | × × ‿ | ἄνθρωπος |
| Acute on penult | × | ἀνθρώπου |
| Acute on penult | ‿‿ | φόνος |
| Circumflex on penult | – ‿ | τοῦτο |
| Acute on ultima | × | αὐτή, αὐτός |
| Circumflex on ultima | – | αὐτοῦ |