Clitics and Pseudo-Clitics in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist

“Accent does not equal stress. It quite often denotes stress, but not always...” (Appendix Metrica, p. 306). The reverse is also true: lack of accent does not necessarily mean lack of stress. To put it differently, accent-bearing words may in fact be clitic and words without accent may in fact be orthotonic. Byzantine accentuation has never been properly studied. On the one hand, there are the classicists who ignore the manuscript evidence and blindly follow the traditional rules of accentuation (e.g. τὴν γυναῖκά μου at the caesura); on the other, there is the Noret school who fail to understand that accents may be graphematic (e.g. τε may be written as τὲ in manuscripts but remains clitic). The only way out of this linguistic mess is to study hymnography which, as it has strict homotony (stresses placed on certain set syllables), allows us to examine in which environments (phonological, syntactic and semantic) accent or lack of accent is relevant. In this paper, I shall look at the indefinite pronoun τις/τι, the personal pronouns με/μου/μοι and σε/σου/σοι, the indefinite adverbs που, πως, and ποτε, and the connectives δέ, γάρ, μέν, and οὖν in the kontakia of Romanos the Melodist. I shall also compare the editorial practices of Maas/Trypanis and Grosdidier de Matons in this respect and check these against the readings of the tenth-century manuscript Sin. gr. 925 (Diktyon 59300).