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7.42 Enclitics

Most words in Greek have a stressed syllable which is marked by an accent mark (an acute, or grave, or circumflex mark). There are a few words in Greek, however, which do not have a stressed syllable of their own.

The proclitics are unstressed words that "lean" on the stress of the word that follows them. Some examples of proclitics are nominative forms of the masucline and feminine definite article, and there are also some prepositions which are proclitics (ἐκ, εἰς, and ἐν).

The enclitics are unstressed words that "lean" on the stress of the preceding word. When an enclitic leans back on the preceding word, it effectively makes that preceding word longer, which can lead to many complicated patterns of accentuation. Please read Croy's discussion about the accentuation of enclitics in Lesson 7, section 42 - but do not worry about this too much! In the Greek writing you do for this class, you are not marking the accents, so you will not need to know how to apply these rules.

You will be learning several enclitic forms in this lesson, such as some forms of the verb "to be" and some forms of the personal pronouns.


Biblical Greek Online. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. Page last updated: April 9, 2005 8:06 PM


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