Archaisms and Innovations in Homeric Accentuation

Archaisms and Innovations in Homeric Accentuation

Jesse Lundquist, UCLA

The Alexandrian grammarians provide us with surprising evidence for the retention of ar- chaic accentuation preserving patterns derived from the Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-European past, indicative of a highly conservative Homeric tradition of pronouncing the words exactly as they had been handed down (see Probert 2003:166-8, West 1998:XVIII-XXII). In this paper I will offer a close philological analysis of two suffixes, the middle participle -μενος, as well as the bet- ter known archaic oxytones found in the feminine forms of a few u-stems adjectives (e.g. θαμειαί Α 52, see Wackernagel 1953:1175ff., Cassio 2002:113-4). In reassessing the evidence for and likely prehistory of these suffixes we will see that each offers evidence for a more complex prehistory of accentual changes than has been hitherto appreciated.

For the suffix -μενος, forming middle participles, I propose that we need to recognize the following stages in the evolution of its accentual properties. According to the evidence drawn from its cognate form in Old Indic -āná- (Macdonell 1910:§§491-3) and the known Greek tendency to develop leftward, but not rightward, shifts of accent, the prehistory of the Greek suffix is rightly reconstructed as oxytone *-menós. In the attested history of Greek, we have three distinct accentual properties of the suffix, corresponding to what I will argue to be three innovations in the prehistory of accent assignment to this suffix:

I. Present and aorist participles are accented recessively without exception, e.g. λυόμενος ‘loosing (for oneself)’, λυσάμενος ‘having loosed (for onself)’. I will argue that this accentuation likeliest owes to a prehistoric change to default accentuation (recessive), corresponding to the same change witnessed in finite verbs (Probert 2012).

II. Perfect participles, and only participles formed to this tense-aspect stem, within attested Greek are lexically accented on the suffix -μένος. This accentuation results from a phonolog- ically conditioned rule whereby oxytone accentuation was retracted leftwards if the word ended in a dactylic sequence, e.g. to λείπω *le-leip-menós ‘has left’ > λελειμμένος (“Wheeler’s Law”, Probert 2006:87-96, Gunkel 2014). The scope of the phonological rule must have be- come restricted to certain morphological classes, changing the accentual property of the suffix into lexically accented -μένος.

III. A few forms are irregularly accented (from the point of view of the participial accent) on the final syllable of the suffix, -μενός, including personal and place names derived from participles like Ὀρχομενός, Σωιζομενός, etc. Such irregular accents withstand philological scrutiny, e.g. in the case of Ἀκεσσαμενός (Φ 142) a scholiast gives the specific comment that the name is to be accented as oxytone (ὀξυτονητέον, Hdn. ΣΑT ed. Erbse ad loc.; see too Eust. vol.4, 474, l.27). We will treat these forms as archaisms, entered into the lexicon with oxytone accent (so underlyingly accented -μενός), thereby blocking the morphology from building the participle as a participle and hence resisting neutralization to the default pattern for the suffix -μενος (on this formulation see Bermúdez-Otero 2012:17-21).