Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com