Pity poor Hegelochus. This Ancient Greek actor once provoked unexpected laughter during the premier of the Euripidean tragedy Orestes in 408 BC. What

Ancient Greek Accents in Ten Rules

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2021-06-14 05:00:11

Pity poor Hegelochus. This Ancient Greek actor once provoked unexpected laughter during the premier of the Euripidean tragedy Orestes in 408 BC. What was so funny? In a lapse of concentration, he unwittingly delivered a line where the expected γαλήν’ (elided γαληνά) came out as γαλῆν (accusative of γαλῆ). So the crowd heard the distressed Orestes announce to his sister and the world, not “after the storm I see again the calm sky”, but “after the storm I see again the… weasel”.[1]Line 279, and the passage in which it occurs, can be read in Greek and English here; the source for this famous story is a scholion – or ancient scholar’s commentary – on the garbled line. The comic playwright Aristophanes, never one to miss a jibe at Euripides, mocked the event three years later in his Frogs, line 303, readable here. Madness, they say, can take many forms.

Just like the Furies, Ancient Greek accents have been known to drive students mad because of their apparent complexity. But this need not be so: while these strange squiggles seem baffling at first view, they are in reality quite well behaved. So, if you are a reader of Greek texts and are still to get full control of these diacritical marks, Antigone offers you this (relatively) short list of ten rules.[2]OK, this is one of 25 footnotes…

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