Ancient Greek Theory of Prosody

Abstract

Chapter 3 takes a look at Greek grammatical theory on prosody, and especially the area that was of most interest to the Latin grammarians: how a word’s accent can be affected by its context in connected speech. The Greek grammatical tradition provided a way of thinking about accents in terms of two levels of description: an abstract level at which each word had exactly one accent (its ‘natural’ or ‘own’ accent), and a concrete level at which each word had the correct accentuation for its context. The two levels were connected by a system of rules. The ‘natural’ accent was thus an abstract entity: it existed on the abstract level of the descriptive system, as a starting point for applying rules. The chapter introduces features of this descriptive system that will help to shed light on Latin discussions of the Latin accent.