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The Ancient Greek accent is believed to have been a melodic or pitch accent.. In Ancient Greek, one of the final three syllables of each word carries an accent. Each syllable contains a vowel with one or two vocalic morae, and one mora in a word is accented; the accented mora is pronounced at a higher pitch than other morae.
The accents (Ancient Greek: τόνοι, romanized: tónoi, singular: τόνος, tónos) are placed on an accented vowel or on the last of the two vowels of a diphthong (ά, but αί) and indicated pitch patterns in Ancient Greek. The precise nature of the patterns is not certain, but the general nature of each is known.
Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, consisting of many dialects. All Greek dialects derive from Proto-Greek and they share certain characteristics, but there were also distinct differences in pronunciation. For instance, the form of Doric in Crete had a digraph θθ , which likely stood for a sound not present in Attic. [2]
Assuming a typical American accent as an interpretation of Peck's English-language examples, the vowels α, ι, and ο/ω are pronounced as IPA /a/, /ɪ/, and /o/ (father, king, note), and for these three letters length influences only the temporal duration.
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
The acute (accent aigu) is only used in "é", modifying the "e" to make the sound /e/, as in étoile ("star"). The circumflex (accent circonflexe) generally denotes that an S once followed the vowel in Old French or Latin, as in fête ("party"), the Old French being feste and the Latin being festum. Whether the circumflex modifies the vowel's ...
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For other Ancient Greek dialects, such as Doric, Aeolic, or Koine Greek, please use |generic=yes. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. See Ancient Greek phonology and Modern Greek phonology for a more thorough look at their sounds.