Enclitic Accents, Further Simplified

In 2010, Classical World published an admirable Paedagogus article by Renan Baker suggesting a short and simple pair of rules that could be used for teaching the accentuation of enclitics to beginning students of Greek.¹ His rules are clearly easier for the student to remember than the usual multiple paragraphs of intimidating possibilities and exceptions that one finds in introductory grammar textbooks. In this note I offer an even simpler rule set, modified from Baker’s and reformulated into an easy-to-use flowchart.

Baker’s rules are as follows:

• • If there is an acute accent on the penult (second syllable from the end) of a word preceding an enclitic, only a dissyllabic enclitic takes an accent on its ultima; a monosyllabic enclitic has no accent.

• • If there is no acute accent on the penult of a word preceding an enclitic, its unaccented ultima is accented with an acute. An accented ultima retains its original accent.

These rules cover all the major points of enclitic accentuation usually discussed in Greek textbooks (the more or less exotic exceptions can be found in Smyth)² and are elegantly concise. Still, I have found in practice that brows continue to be over-furrowed on some students who struggle to recall them. It occurred to me that a simplified version of Baker’s rules might be better in a flowchart format, one that also begins, rather than ends, with what I think is the easiest and most intuitive of the rules for enclitics: if the preceding word is already accented on the ultima, then one has nothing to do. I therefore offer the following as a simple handout that boils down to two easy questions and includes examples for illustration and mnemonic purposes in each case:

The instructor will still need to clarify and expand on some details, but the flowchart should simplify the most difficult-to-remember aspects of enclitic accentuation. I note that one could, if one wished, simplify the chart further still by removing the first step and changing the “no” box on the remaining step to “accent the last syllable of X if it doesn’t have one already,” but this seemed less intuitive to myself and my test group.³ A rhyming version of this shortened procedure (“Pénult τινά (τις), else Ultimá τις,” to be read with a stress accent) fared only marginally better, though others may find the attempt worth pursuing. The two-step flowchart as given above proved the most easily digestible and enduringly memorable, and I hope that instructors will find it useful.