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The Ancient Greek accent is believed to have been a melodic or pitch accent.. In Ancient Greek, one of the final three syllables of each word carries an accent. Each syllable contains a vowel with one or two vocalic morae, and one mora in a word is accented; the accented mora is pronounced at a higher pitch than other morae.
The accents (Ancient Greek: τόνοι, romanized: tónoi, singular: τόνος, tónos) are placed on an accented vowel or on the last of the two vowels of a diphthong (ά, but αί) and indicated pitch patterns in Ancient Greek. The precise nature of the patterns is not certain, but the general nature of each is known.
Ancient Greek had a pitch accent, unlike the stress accent of Modern Greek and English. One mora of a word was accented with high pitch. A mora is a unit of vowel length; in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae.
Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute (έ, ή) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel (é, eé). A circumflex (ῆ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel (ée).
It is usually accepted that in classical Greek the accent was a pitch accent, that is, the accented syllable was pronounced on a higher pitch than the other syllables of the word. [2] The accent is believed to have changed to a stress accent by about the 2nd century AD. [3]
Ancient Greek in Italy is always [citation needed] taught in the Erasmian pronunciation. However, Italian speakers find it hard to reproduce the pitch-based Ancient Greek accent accurately so the circumflex and acute accents are not distinguished. Poetry is read using metric conventions that stress the long syllables.
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In Ancient Greek grammar, a perispomenon (/ p ɛ r ə ˈ s p ɑː m ə ˌ n ɑː n / peh-rə-SPAW-mə-NAWN; Ancient Greek: περισπώμενον perispṓmenon) is a word with a high-low pitch contour on the last syllable, indicated in writing by a tilde diacritic ( ̃) or an inverted breve accent mark ( ̑) in native transcriptions with the Greek alphabet, or by a circumflex accent mark ...