Saturday, November 11, 2017

Some accents to note

5
Romans 16:5 Ἐπαινετὸν τὸν ἀγαπητόν μου not Ἐπαίνετον τὸν ἀγαπητόν μου.

03


06


104


757


1424


Matthew 7:10 ἰχθῦν αἰτήσει not ἰχθὺν αἰτήσει (of course this affects the nominative and accusative singular of ἰχθῦς and ὀσφῦς elsewhere).

03


011


017


021


But 

481


1424



In assessing the differences between witnesses, we can take into account how smart, consistent, deliberate and grammatically knowledgeable each scribe was in matters of accentuation. The accentor of Vaticanus (B 03) is particularly deliberate and accents ἰχθῦς, ὀσφῦς and ὀφρῦς consistently, including for the genitive singular, e.g. Luke 11:11, against Herodian’s rules:


In this it was isolated, so we didn’t follow it in the THGNT. Minuscules tended to replace circumflexes with acutes and graves. This is but a grammatical trifle, but we had fun discussing it in preparing the THGNT and learning from Patrick James, who is, according to Dirk Jongkind the only person he knows who truly knows ancient Greek.

With thanks once more to CSNTM and the Vatican Library for images.

5 comments

  1. Has Patrick James or someone else written a diachronic study on accentuation?

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  2. Hi Stephen,
    Jose M. Gonzalez edited a text on Diachrony (degruter, 2015). This is volume 7 as part of the MythosEikonPoiesis series. You will find a list of publications by Dr Patrick James here: https://cambridge.academia.edu/PatrickJames, and a good example of James' expertise can be seen in this TH Blog article: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/thgnt_blog/2017/10/03/removing-a-venerable-absurdity-of-spelling-luke-22-24-and-1-corinthians-11-16/

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  3. We've not written a diachronic study. There is a lot about accents which is not known, and the studies of accents (Probert, Lee, etc.) don't really focus on manuscripts.

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    Replies
    1. What about the dieresis over the initial iota? Why was there no comment about that? The Greek New Testaments that I've checked do not have that.

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    2. ἰχθῦν The initial iota does not have the dieresis that the above mss have.

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