Metre and Stress in Greek

Abstract

THE MODERN GREEK ACCENT is one of stress; that is to say, with the exception of certain short words with grammatical rather than lexical meaning (articles, conjunctions, prepositions), one syllable of each word is pronounced louder than the rest. As in the case of other languages with stress systems (such as English), the stressed syllables are in general higher in musical pitch and somewhat longer than the unstressed ones. A case could therefore be argued for treating either pitch or duration as primary attributes of accent and accordingly relegating loudness to a subordinate status on the basis that it is associated automatically with whatever of these first two we treat as fundamental. We select the more usual analysis in the belief that our overall phonological description is thus made somewhat simpler and that while loudness is invariably associated with the accented syllable, the other features may be lacking (e.g., certain types of sentence intonation may require the pitch level to remain constant throughout certain given stretches of utterance).' That the modern accent is one of stress is not without significance for the historical phonology of post-Hellenistic Greek; a complete statement of the conditions under which certain vowel developments are precipitated or inhibited must contain reference to stress. Thus apocope of unstressed initial vowels is common (/psil6s/, tall, < V rX6s; /lyizome/, I bask, <hiXLa4o/aL; contrast /ipsos/, height, <ifos; /ilyos/, sun, <V7Xtos). The clearest examples of stress-determined vowel change can be drawn from the northern dialects, where there is a general rule causing unstressed /i/ and /u/ to disappear, and raising unstressed /e/ (whatever its provenance) to /i/, and unstressed /o/ to /u/. Whence the utterance cited on various occasions to the author in Lesbos: