QUESTION
Hi Dennis,
Hebrews. 1:1, Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως
Hebrews 1:1 (NA27) Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις
Why are these two Greek adverbs accented differently? How can one remember—aside from rote memory—which is ultimate and which is penultimate?
RESPONSE
Your hope is forlorn. Unlike Latin, Greek has variable lemma accents. Non-verb lemma accent types (5) must largely be memorized with the vocabulary. Verb accents do not need to be memorized individually but follow rules. Unparsed lemmas have no variants to speak of but are statistically small. Your adverb examples fall in the adjective category.
The majority of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are retentive and follow derivation rules, but the lemmas mostly need to be memorized although there are a few tricks for maybe 5% of them. There are about 4000 of these declensional lemmas as opposed to 25,000 standard inflections and 2,500 more nonstandard variant inflections. Since 2 thirds of these are recessive, you really only need to learn about 2,700. Daunting but gotta bite the bullet. No shortcut. Learning the accent rules only helps with the 23,000 regularly derived inflections, not the original 4000 declensional lemmas.
However, the above discussion only pertains to the 5 non-contextual accent types. The contextual accents involve proclitic, grave, and enclitic and affect about 40% of word occurrences, and there is a second set of complex contextual accent rules for these.
Many people like Mounce simply find both the 4000 declensional lemma accents and the two kinds of rules more trouble than they are worth and simply give up on learning GNT accents. It is a rational choice. We all save time somewhere unless we are learning a spoken language. Accents can be read properly without memorizing anything. However, the contextual accents form accent chains of 2 to 12 words which are interesting units in themselves if you want to see them as a kind of epiphenomenon on the text overlaying the punctuation chains and the syntax units. These chains can be identified with a few rules.