AntigoneJournal

It is certainly the most world's read "Latin" - but yes it's in fact a bit of Cicero's philosophy that has been hacked to pieces and stitched together by an unknown typographer in Swinging Sixties London. A strange story!

A good question. The best, i.e. least likely to be unreliable, sources are: epistles as preserved by papyri; conversations as preserved in ancient drama (especially comedy); phrase-books that survive from ancient school curricula; funerary inscriptions that use everyday language; graffiti.

Thanks for these questions. (1) The cases under rule #2 are a mixture of proclitics and common words (such as the two conjunctions and the adverb ou). Most proclitics (including most prepositions, and most forms of the definite article) in fact do keep their accent, so a general rule can't be given. Since enclitics do follow set rules, which are much more complex than simply not having an accent, they are given their proper treatment separately in the last (and most tricky) of the rules!

(2) Analysis by morae, whereby a short syllable counts as one mora, and a long syllable as two, generally allows the rule that an acute cannot go back more than four morae, and a circumflex more than three morae - but you still have to deal with the fact that, as you say, a final long restricts an acute to three morae from the end, and face the exception given in n.13. So we decided to avoid it entirely!

We never found it either - so there's a danger this may be a joke!

Good on you: it is perfectly fine Ancient Greek!

Many thanks for this. Yes, a fuller article would make mention of 'crasis' - where two successive words are melded into one utterance - which inevitably affected pitch and accentuation. As to breathings, their affect on pitch (as opposed to pronunciation) was null: the rough was a mere aspirate, and the 'smooth' was in effect the absence of any aspirate. Latin, as a fellow Indo-European language, had inherited initial aspirates, although these were fewer in number than in Greek, where rho and upsilon always had initial aspiration, and where Indo-European s- had become an aspirate (compare Lat. serpo with Gk herpo, or Lat. sal with your Greek hals.)