alt Hacker NewsI recognise that quote. :) But am I right in noticing a lack of breathings? Unless the tilde indicates it. I'm not sure of the difference between the acutes and graves here. I am used to seeing only one kind of accent on ancient Greek vowels.
Replies
mkehrt • today at 2:02 AM
There are in fact rough breathing marks there on the articles, stacked under the inverted breve accents. Which is an alternate form of tilde.
milkcrate • yesterday at 10:31 PM
Could vary by text? I see breathing marks in Homer.
The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News.
A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.