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  • Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory
  • Adam I. Cooper
Philomen Probert . Ancient Greek Accentuation: Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Classical Monographs. Pp. xxvi, 444. $175.00. ISBN 978-0-19-927960-9.

Going by its title, you might reasonably expect that Philomen Probert's recently published Ancient Greek Accentuation assumes a rather expansive scope of the eponymous subject matter; I certainly did. But within minutes of reading, the aims of the book were made perfectly clear: Ancient Greek Accentuation is, in fact, a rather close and focused examination of the accentual properties of a small, historically-significant set of nominal affixes present in ancient Greek, namely second declension suffixes -ρο-, -το-, -νο-, -λο-, and -μο-.

The main body of the text is divided into two sections. In the first, Probert essentially tackles the oft-pondered question, How do we know how a language no longer spoken actually sounded? focusing on the accentuation of ancient Greek. She first reviews the ancient sources (albeit non-contemporaneous with Classical Greek), the grammarians. Following their attestations, she presents the various theories, both ancient and modern, put forth to account for the linguistic underpinnings of the law of limitation and its role in the assignment of the Greek accent, the aspect of the accentual system with which the aims of the book are most concerned. Not only do these surveys together lay a strong foundation for the examination Probert undertakes in the second section, they also provide a certain amount of comfort in the difficulty shared by generations of scholars trying to make sense of a system for which they lack a native knowledge.

The second part of the book focuses on the aforementioned suffixes and seeks to account for the discrepancies in the accentuation of the nouns and adjectives which feature them. As a prelude to her discussion, Probert crucially argues for the default nature of recessive accentuation in Greek, a not unreasonable assertion considering the extent to which it is found in the language, and considers how the nature of inflectional and derivational suffixes, which may or may not possess accentual characteristics, affect accentuation of entire words.

Chapters 6–9 and 11 (chapter 10 presents intermediate conclusions), each devoted to a single suffix, proceed in much the same fashion: first, a description of usage in nominal formations; next, reviews of comparative evidence (confined to Sanskrit and [Proto-] Germanic forms) and descriptive accounts of the suffix's influence on accentuation within Greek; and finally, presentation and analysis of data, relevant forms gleaned from the Perseus Digital Library. One wonders what sort of results would have been provided by consultation of the TLG instead, although with its more than three million words, Probert seems justifiably satisfied with her source.

A central claim drawn from this exploration is that, as suffixes lose their synchronic identity as such (a process of "demorphologization" [233 et al.]), they concurrently lose whatever accentual properties they might possess: an adjectival suffix, for instance, loses its morphological content when a word which features it becomes a noun (substantivization). Subsequently, this can lead to the default—that is, recessive—placement of accentuation for these newly opaque forms. To support this idea, historical corpus work seems crucial, as one should attempt to ascertain when, for instance, a particular adjective became substantivized in the history of Greek (a not necessarily straightforward endeavor), and correlate that independent determination with the accent of the form; otherwise, the argument for demorphologization having occurred could be seen as being circular. In any case, as neat and elegant [End Page 258] an account as this may be, not all the suffixes and their associated data are uniformly explained by it, as Probert appropriately points out; indeed, within the collected forms various exceptions and stages of development can be observed, having explanations of their own.

An interesting phenomenon emerges in Probert's corpus work, in which noun frequency (as determined by prevalence in the Perseus database) often seems to dictate, or at least correlate with, accentuation. Both the most frequently and least frequently appearing nouns tend not to have recessive accentuation. This result comes as something of a surprise, particularly with respect to the...

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