diacriticals

Diacritical and Punctuation Marks

1.    Is your GREEK FONT installed correctly? Please do not do this lesson if it is not.
2.    Have you mastered the preceding lesson? Are you comfortable with the Greek letters and the diphthongs?

If you look at Philemon 1:1-7, you will notice that there are other marks on the page beside the ones you learned in the previous lessons.

    Some of these special markings are called diacritical marks and were added to the text to help the reader pronounce the words correctly. There are also punctuation marks which aid in reading complete sentences with the proper pauses so that the proper meaning is emphasized.   The punctuation marks only reflect the traditional way of reading the text, but this is usually the most logical way of reading the text and very seldom does it make much difference in interpretation.
1. Breathing Marks: The breathing mark shows whether or not a word beginning with a vowel or diphthong is to be preceded with an 'H' sound.
a.   ROUGH BREATHING

1.    Look at the mark above the following alpha: a`
2.    It is called a rough breathing mark and it tells us that there is an H sound before the alpha. So the a` is pronounced ha like in "ha ha ha".
b. Smooth Breathing

1)    Look at the mark above the following alpha: av
2)    It is backwards from the rough breathing isn't it? It makes no sound and so you just make the usual sound of the alpha. Why use it? I don't know, they just do!
c.   Special Rules: The mark appears either over the second vowel of a diphthong or a regular vowel that is the first letter in a word. If the word or the initial vowel is capitalized then the mark precedes the first vowel in the word.
EXAMPLES: The first two examples should be pronounced with an H at the beginning (rough).
   ai` = hai
   o` = ho
   ouvk = ouk
2. ACCENT MARKS: There are three accent marks in Greek and the appear above the lower case letters or before a capital. For the sake of illustration they will be placed in our chart above an alpha.

Acute a,

Grave a.

Circumflex a/

For the purposes of this course there are no practical differences between the forms except to note that they are there. The accent marks may be combined with the breathing mark, but this does not modify the function of either mark.
Exercise
Click here to open the Greek text of the Beatitudes. Try to pronounce the words in the Beatitudes yourself.
Select the "Click to Hear!" link and listen to the reader pronounce them.   If you cannot follow along then practice some more.

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