A recent study from The Ohio State University offers a breakthrough explanation for why the pronunciation of certain ancient Greek words has long confused scholars. Junyu Ruan, the study’s sole author, has identified the underlying patterns that determine how stress is placed in adjectives with common suffixes, revealing that these irregularities are anything but random.
Published in the Journal of Greek Linguistics, the research challenges long-standing views about how Greek words were formed and spoken. Specifically, it focuses on adjectives ending in “-es” and “-to,” which often carry accents in unpredictable places.
Some keep the accent on the suffix, others move it to the root, while some default to a standard accent position. These differences have puzzled experts trying to trace the original pronunciation of ancient Greek words, especially since the rules seemed inconsistent even within similar word forms.
Traditionally, scholars treated word formation as the stacking of morphemes—basic units of meaning. But this approach falls short when it comes to explaining where the stress lands in ancient Greek. Ruan argues that assigning accent based solely on individual morphemes doesn’t hold up, especially when vowel contractions or compound structures are involved.
Word patterns hold the key to accent placement
Instead, the study proposes a word-based model rooted in a theory known as Construction Morphology. In this framework, words are not just assembled from parts but follow larger structural patterns, or schemata, which carry their own phonological rules. These patterns, rather than the individual morphemes, dictate where the stress should go.
Ruan identifies three main types of accent placement in adjectives ending in “-es” and “-to”: suffixal (on the suffix), stem (on the root or compound element), and recessive (falling back to a default position based on general rules of Greek phonology).
For example, the adjective pseudés meaning “false” keeps the accent on the suffix, while thésphatos, meaning “spoken by gods,” shifts the accent leftward. Some words like nosoodôon (“sickly”) further complicate matters due to vowel contractions that blur the original stress pattern.
To make sense of these variations, the study introduces a two-step process. First, a word may receive a lexical accent from its schema—this happens before any vowel contraction.
If no accent is assigned at this stage, a default, or recessive, accent is applied after contraction based on fixed phonological constraints. These constraints determine how far left the accent can go, depending on syllable structure and length.
Revealing the timing of accent and contraction
This layered approach helps explain inconsistencies that earlier models could not. For instance, compound adjectives built with prefixes often ignore the suffix’s accent in “-to” forms but keep it in “-es” forms.
Previous scholars tried to link these patterns to meaning or function, but Ruan’s findings show that structure plays a bigger role than semantics.
The model also accounts for how vowel contractions influence the final accent. In forms like syneéthoon (“living together”), the position of the stress depends on whether the contraction occurred before or after the accent was placed.
Ruan demonstrates that only a multi-cycle model—one that separates the timing of stress assignment and vowel contraction—can correctly predict the final spoken form.
The implications of the research go beyond linguistics. An accurate understanding of Greek stress patterns can affect how ancient texts are read aloud or interpreted in historical studies. Ruan believes this model provides a more precise way to recover how ancient speakers might have actually pronounced their language.
By focusing on whole-word patterns rather than individual parts, the study presents a clearer, more consistent explanation for what once seemed like erratic accent placement. According to Ruan, these findings offer a simplified but powerful tool for decoding the pronunciation of ancient Greek words across a wide range of forms.
