Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory

by Philomen Probert

The accent of many Greek words has long been considered arbitrary, but Philomen Probert points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word's synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency, that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system. Bringing together comparative evidence for the Indo-European accentuation of the relevant categories with recent insights into the effects that loss of transparency and word frequency have on language change, Probert uses the synchronically observable correlations to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek from the Hellenistic period onwards.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess to not reading Philomen Probert's ANCIENT GREEK ACCENTUATION all the way through. Even when I am something of an Indo-Europeanist and passionate about the development of Greek, the book was a bit too dry and statistical for me. However, I thought I'd write a reviewer here to alert others to what the book is. In spite of the title, it is NOT a simple explanation of the seemingly unpredictable accent system for Classics students. For that, you want Probert's earlier work A NEW SHORT GUIDE TO THE ACCENTUATION OF ANCIENT GREEK.

Rather, what you in fact get is expressed by the subtitle: "Syncrhonic patterns, frequency effects, and prehistory". The first 120 pages of the book, of general interest and duplicated to some extent in the NEW SHORT GUIDE, explains how modern scholars know anything about the Greek system of accentuation. I was familiar with Byzantine grammarians, but the use of musical texts was a surprise. The bulk of the work, however, is an examination of the corpus to determine e.g. the underlying accent of various suffixes (-mo-, -ro-, -to- etc.). There's discussion of the interplay of form and meaning, and some implications for linguistic theory and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.