The Greek Diminutive Suffix -lOy.o- -lOxr,-. 149 



13. That the accent of -igtio- -kt/cTj- is invariably on the penult 

 has been something of a mystery in view of the fact that neither 

 the quantity of the ultima, which is short in the masculine and 

 neuter, nor the ending -0x0- demands that accentuation. ^ More- 

 over, the -is-, being the weak form of the strong -ies-, must cer- 

 tainly have been unaccented originally. Of no importance is the 

 analogy of lyw,^ which when in composition with ys retracts its 

 accent to the first syllable (sywys not *iycoy£) ; for the contrast of 

 s[j.sy£ shows that it is due to the Attic ' law of the properispo- 



mena ' {^ c^ :^ became <L' :^), for which cf. Vendryes, Mem. 



13. 218 ff. But by all means the accentuation of the t must be 

 secondary and due to a development within the Greek itself. 



14. As to its cause, Allinson, A. J. of Ph. 12. 53, 56, maintains 

 that the language had a tendency to accent the penult of dimin- 

 utives, and that this could be the only reason why -i«7xo- was so 

 accented. Similarly Hatzidakis, Glotta i. 124, declares that the 

 diminutives in -loxo-, having a variable gender, were patterned 

 after those in -ukoq, -iXoi;, and -i/o?, which also had two genders, 

 and that in all of these cases the diminutive meaning had some- 

 thing to do with the accentuation of the suffixes. If, however, 

 such a tendency really existed, it must itself be explained, for it 

 is certainly neither anything inherent in the nature of a diminutive 

 nor an I. E. tendency, and a further difficulty lies in the fact that the 

 only larger body of diminutives which is regular in the application 

 of this rule comprises these words in -i'txo-, which are most difficult 

 to explain, while -tov is not so accented under all circumstances,^ 

 and the other categories comprise only small groups, largely dia- 

 lectical at that, and hardly fit to give rise to a large pan-Hellenic 

 category. It will therefore be better to search for a common cause 

 which can explain -10^.0- as well as -(iko-, -iko-, and -iyo-. And 

 this seems to me to lie in the influence of the feminine on the 

 masculine and neuter, an influence which could, of course, not be 

 found in the invariably neuter -lov. While therefore there was no 

 force to change tioBiov to *xoBiov, a word like [xsipaxicnto? ' lad,' 

 even if originally accented *pipaxt(T)to?, would be perpetually as- 

 sociated with the feminine [j.£ipaHi«7>:7] ' lass,' whose accent could 

 not go back as far as tfie antepenult because of the long ultima, 

 and consequently the accent had a tendency to become leveled. 

 Since the feminine was precluded from being assimilated to the 



1 Cf. Hatzidakis, Glotta i. 124. 



2 Cf. AlUnson. A. J. of Ph. 12. 56. 



3 Cf. Gr. Dims. 10 ff. 



