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Abstract Wackernagel’s Law II (also called the Law of Lengthening, among other names) refers to the lengthening of a short initial vowel in the second word of a compound, as in dus-āḗs ‘ill-blowing’ from aênai ‘to blow’. The second member of a compound in Greek often begins with a long vowel, where a short vowel would be expected based on the vowel of the root. The lengthening (Germ. Dehnung) of that vowel has come to be known as Wackernagel’s other law, Wackernagel II, the Law of Lengthening, or the Dehnungsgesetz, after Wackernagel (1889). Note that long ā, ē, ō in the second member of eac…

Abstract Stress is an abstract property of syllables that often attracts length, loudness, and pitch. Whether Greek had stress or not is not known; evidence for stress in Greek comes from poetic meter and from phonological and morphological considerations including the placement of the recessive pitch accent. Modern Greek has stress (like English or Spanish) and it generally has stress where Ancient Greek had a written accent-mark (acute ´ or circumflex ˆ); orthographically, stress is shown in Modern Greek with an acute accent over the stressed vo…