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The ancient Greek grammarians indicated the word-accent with three diacritic signs: the acute (ά), the circumflex (ᾶ), and the grave (ὰ). The acute was the most commonly used of these; it could be found on any of the last three syllables of a word. Some examples are: ἄνθρωποςánthrōpos 'man, person'.
Originally, certain proclitic words lost their accent before another word and received the grave, and later this was generalized to all words in the orthography. Others—drawing on, for instance, evidence from ancient Greek music —consider that the grave was "linguistically real" and expressed a word-final modification of the acute pitch.
Ancient Greek accent, by contrast, is only based on vowels. A syllable ending in a short vowel, or the diphthongs αι and οι in certain noun and verb endings, was light. All other syllables were heavy: that is, syllables ending in a long vowel or diphthong, a short vowel and consonant, or a long vowel or diphthong and consonant.
Eastern group: Attic. Ionic. In linguistics, Aeolic Greek (/ iːˈɒlɪk /), also known as Aeolian (/ iːˈoʊliən /), Lesbian or Lesbic dialect, is the set of dialects of Ancient Greek spoken mainly in Boeotia; in Thessaly; in the Aegean island of Lesbos; and in the Greek colonies of Aeolis in Anatolia and adjoining islands.
Written accents, marking the tonic syllables of Greek words, appear to have been invented in the 3rd century BC, but only became commonly used in the 2nd century AD. The acute accent ( ´ ; known as ὀξεῖα (oxeîa) in Greek) is used on long or short vowels on any of the last three syllables of a word. However, if the last vowel of the ...
In Ancient Greek, all nouns are classified according to grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and are used in a number (singular, dual, or plural). According to their function in a sentence, their form changes to one of the five cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, or dative). The set of forms that a noun will take for ...
Varieties of Modern Greek. The linguistic varieties of Modern Greek can be classified along two principal dimensions. First, there is a long tradition of sociolectal variation between the natural, popular spoken language on the one hand and archaizing, learned written forms on the other. Second, there is regional variation between dialects.
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions.