Learn the basics of how to accent Greek words
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| Iro: Γεια σας! Είμαι η Ηρώ. |
| Maria: Maria here! Pronunciation Series, Lesson Four on Accents. |
| Hello, and welcome to GreekPod101.com, the fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Greek! |
| Iro: And thanks again for being here with us for this Pronunciation lesson. |
| Maria: What is our focus today, Iro ? |
| Iro: Today we will talk about accents in Greek. |
| Maria: Accents are one of the reasons why spoken Greek can be difficult to understand. |
| Iro: Yeah. But first things first. You may be wondering, what are accents? |
| Maria: Well, an accent mark is used over a letter to indicate which syllable is stressed in a word. |
| Iro: This is something Spanish has too, so it may be easier to understand if you can speak any other European languages. |
| Maria: Yes, for every word with at least two syllables, one of them will be emphasized more than the other. |
| Iro: "Accent," or "τόνος" as it is called in Greek, is always placed above a vowel. |
| Maria: There a few tricky bits about accents that we will look deeper into in this lesson. |
| Iro: Okay. So let's get to the first problematic area. Where to place the accent. |
| Maria: Yeah, unlike French, which stresses almost always the last syllable, and unlike Spanish, which stresses very often the second-to-last syllable, Greek stress is more or less unpredictable. |
| Iro: Exactly. You have to know the sound of the word to know how to stress it. |
| Maria: In modern Greek, since 1982, there is a single mark that shows where the stress goes, and it looks like a tiny slanted line over the vowel in most fonts. |
| Iro: And when this little mark is placed over a different vowel in a word with the same spelling, the meaning changes. |
| Maria: Can you give us an example? |
| Iro: Of course! How about "Αθηνά", the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. |
| Maria: What about her? |
| Iro: Well, here the accent is placed on the last "-a." |
| Maria: And… |
| Iro: Were we to put the accent above the "-i" sound, like this "Αθήνα", we make another word. |
| Maria: So we do! "Athens," the capital of Greece! Fantastic! |
| Iro: If you think this sounds confusing and a pain in the neck, you don't know the half of it! |
| Maria: Yeah, I read that the rules of Ancient Greek were an absolute mess. |
| Iro: There were five different marks in Ancient Greek, and the rules for placing them, although meaningful in ancient times, were meaningless in later times, because the pronunciation of the language had changed and wasn't indicative anymore of which mark to use. |
| Maria: Must have been tough going to school. |
| Iro: Yeah, children had to memorize the stress for each word, and they were making plenty of mistakes in writing. |
| Maria: What a mess. |
| Iro: But, fortunately, the system was simplified greatly. Now there is a single accent mark, as I said. But first, we must learn where to put the accent mark, before we learn when. |
| Maria: Exactly. So where do we put it? |
| Iro: I mentioned earlier that the accent mark goes only over vowels. And the vowels that take the stress are plain vowels and vowel diphthongs. |
| Maria: Plain vowels are exactly that. The seven vowels "α," "ε," "η," "ι," "ο," "υ," and "ω". |
| Iro: Yes, if put in a word, they sound like this…"Έλα" ("to come"), "ισόπεδος" ("level"), and "όμορφη" ("beautiful"). |
| Maria: That was the easy bit. In the case of diphthongs, the stress is different. |
| Iro: Yeah, when stressing a diphthong, the accent mark is placed over the second letter but stressed as one sound. |
| Maria: Examples, please. |
| Iro: So if we have the Greek word for "watermelon" ("καρπούζι"), which is spelled "κ-α-ρ-π-ο-ύ-ζ-ι," the double consonant here is "ού," and if written, the accent mark is placed above the "ύ." |
| Maria: Any other examples? |
| Iro: Yes. The double vowels "αυ," "ευ," and "ηυ" are a bit different from the others. |
| Maria: How is that? |
| Iro: Well, if we take the word "αύριο" ("tomorrow") in English, when spoken, the accent is on the "-a" sound. However, when written "α-ύ-ρ-ι-ο," the accent mark is placed on the "ύ," the second vowel. |
| Maria: If the accent mark were placed over the first letter, then we wouldn't know that this is a vowel diphthong and would pronounce each of its constituents separately, stressing the first vowel and pronouncing the second letter. |
| Iro: Exactly. |
| Maria: Now you might wonder, isn't there any case where one must write the two letters of these double vowels and pronounce them separately, stressing the second vowel? |
| Iro: There is indeed a way to write this by using a mark called a "diaeresis" that is placed over the second vowel, thus dismissing the diphthong. |
| Maria: The diaeresis is still sometimes used in English, over the "-i" of the word "naïve," and for the same reason…showing the special pronunciation of the vowels of this word. |
| Iro: Isn't it wonderful how complex and yet how logical a language can be? |
| Maria: Some would say it's unnecessarily complex… |
| Iro: Fools! Here are some examples. "ευφυΐα," meaning "wit" or "intelligence," "ε–υ-φ-υ-ΐ-α", ευφυΐα. |
| Maria: Something I'm often told I lack...Ha ha ha. |
| Iro: No objection there. |
| Maria: Hey! |
| Iro: There is one more point to the diaerisis. Don't think that the diaeresis in Greek always goes with an accent mark! Quite the contrary…their co-occurrence is very rare. Much more often, the diaeresis is needed to "dismiss" an unstressed pair of letters that otherwise would look like a diphthong. |
| Maria: Like "μαϊντανός!" |
| Iro: Figures you'd give a food example! |
| Maria: What's wrong with "parsley?" Such a useful herb… |
| Iro: And actually a really good example. Μαϊντανός, "Μ-α-ϊ-ν-τ-α-ν-ό-ς", μαϊντανός. |
| Maria: Okay, now that we have got where to put the accent down, how about when to put it? |
| Iro: Well, as I mentioned earlier, the rule to the accent mark is that the accent mark is only used when stressing words with two or more syllables. |
| Maria: But this is a language. And language rules are made to be broken! |
| Iro: Ha ha, yes, and this rule has lots of exceptions. |
| Maria: Let's hear them! |
| Iro: There are "little words" in Greek that appear the same (i.e., spelled with the same letters) but are actually different words. In every one of these word pairs, one of the two words in the pair is stressed in actual speech when spoken within a sentence, whereas the other is unstressed. |
| Maria: Although monosyllabic, we mark the stressed little word with an accent to distinguish it from the other one, which we leave unmarked. It's that simple. |
| Iro: Here are some examples… |
| "που" and "πού," meaning "that," as in "το αυτοκίνητο που πέρασε," meaning "The car that passed." |
| This word is not stressed in English. It's the same in Greek. This kind of "που" is not stressed in a sentence and is not marked with an accent in writing. But there is this other "πού," the interrogative adverb meaning "where," which is always stressed, and it can be used either in questions or in references to questions such as "πού ήσουν," meaning "Where were you?" |
| Finally… |
| "η," "ή." the unstressed one, is the feminine form of the article in the nominative case, singular number. For example, "η φωτιά," meaning "the fire." |
| The emphasized "ή" is the disjunctive particle meaning "either" or "or." |
| For example…"ή εγώ ή εσύ," which means "either I or you." |
| Maria: Wow, I could use a nap after that grammar meal! |
| Iro: Yeah, but we'll wrap it up here for this lesson. |
| Maria: Great! Siesta! |
| Maria: Don't forget that you can leave us a comment on this lesson. |
| Iro: So if you have a question or some feedback, please leave us a comment! |
| Maria: It's very easy to do. Just stop by GreekPod101.com, |
| Iro: click on comments, |
| Maria: enter your comment and name, |
| Iro: and that's it. |
| Maria: No excuses. We're looking forward to hearing from you! |
| Bye! |
| Iro: Γεια σας! |
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