Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

Just like the Furies, Ancient Greek accents have been known to drive students mad because of their apparent complexity. If you saw the letters παιδευσαι, you would naturally want to know whether the intended intonation was educated"), or παιδεῦσαι. It is helpful that Greek accents are written out before our very eyes: they stand above the vowels that form the heart of every syllable. So we find and and First introduced in the second century BC by the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium, written accents help readers of Classical Greek texts pronounce words and sentences as they should be. The rest of the rules explain how it is that certain accents appear in certain positions and never others, and how some rather strange things can happen when particular words are combined. Rules wouldn't be rules without exceptions, so here's one to remember: the interrogative pronoun and pronominal adjective is the only word that never changes its acute accent to a grave under the influence of a following word: e.g. λέγεις;. Since this grave accent denotes the lower rise of pitch found exclusively on a word's last syllable, it can only ever be found there. A reminder, then: acute accents can stand on any of the last three syllables, circumflex accents on either of the last two, grave only on the last. These rules should give you sufficient working knowledge of what will happen to the accents of words within any given sentence.