Re: polytonic Greek: diacritics above long vowels ᾱ, ῑ, ῡ

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 22:47:56 -0700
Stephan Stiller <stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com> wrote:
 
>> The practice in Scott and Liddell is to reserve ᾱ, ῑ and ῡ for a
>> note after the dictionary entry.

> I'm looking at Liddell-Scott-/Jones/ here
> <http://www.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/> and at old pdf's of Liddell & Scott
> [only] by Google, and I cannot easily confirm your statement. Perhaps
> it holds for specific or older editions.

My statement was inaccurate. Where there is no diacritic on the vowel,
then macrons are used for alpha, iota and upsilon in the headwords.

Look up the entry "ἰλύ-ω [ῑ], (ἰλύς)" at the same URL. For this entry
and the next you will see that where the letters already bear a
diacritic, the length is given by repeating the vowel in brackets with
a length mark. Another example is "κατακλύω [ῠ], hear of".

There are a few further things to note:

1) Vowel lengths are not shown where one is expected to know it, e.g.
in the prefixes of verbs

2) Vowel lengths are not shown in closed syllables - strictly
speaking, breve and macron are being used to show syllable weight, not
vowel length.

3) Some diacritics imply vowel length.

Richard.
Received on Sat Aug 03 2013 - 08:15:37 CDT