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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

> It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us

I never laughed at this, it's not strange that there are words or word forms where the only difference is a single phonetic feature, or indeed where there is no difference at all. As you say that is the case in all languages.

And regarding accents in Greek, I don't recall encountering any case where the position of the accent was the crux. Which isn't really surprising given that the texts didn't have accents originally, so the writers couldn't rely on that alone.

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In Classical Greek, it isn't just the position of the accent that matters but the kind of accent there. You are right that the Greeks themselves did not need the accents notated, but students of Greek today often rely on the accent to tell e.g. the eta or eta+nu words apart.

Sure, I took 6 full-time terms of Classical Greek so I'm familiar with the different accents.

But my Greek studies took place 20 years ago so I do wonder what you mean by eta and eta + nu words? Are these different subtypes of the third declension?

Eta alone can mean ‘the’, ‘she who’, ‘either/or’, ‘indeed’, ‘than’, or ‘I was’, with the accent helping to narrow it down. Eta+nu is ‘her who’, ‘he/she/it was’, etc.

Also, for example, tau+iota is either an interrogative or an indefinite pronoun, and it is the accent which tells you which without having to scan further through the sentence.

Ok, I thought you were talking about word endings.

Well sure, there are minimal pairs, but most of the time it’s immediately clear from the context, and we have to keep in mind that the accents were added much later by modern philologists, so they have de facto been deduced from the context.

But sure, there goldilocks zone where it’s not obvious to the lay reader, but the scholars are pretty certain what it should say, and then it helps. I wouldn’t say it’s a major struggle when reading Greek though.

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