The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit, or Vedic accent for brevity, is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" (acute accent, high pitch), anudātta "not raised" (grave accent, low pitch) and svarita "sounded" (circumflex, falling pitch). In the Rigveda, svarita is marked with a small upright stroke above a syllable and anudātta with a horizontal line below the syllable, while udātta remains unmarked.

Udātta marks the place of the inherited PIE accent. In transliteration, therefore, udātta is usually marked with an acute accent, while anudātta and svarita remain unmarked since their positions follow automatically from the position of udātta. For example, in the first pada of the Rigveda, the transliteration

agním īḍe puróhitaṃ

"Agni I laud, the high priest."

means that the eight syllables have an intonation of

A-U-S-A-A-U-S-A (where A=anudātta, U=udātta, S=svarita),

or iconically,

_¯\__¯\_

Note that , the finite verb, receives no udātta, while its first syllable is svarita as an automatic consequence of the word-final udātta of the preceding word. Note that Vedic meter is independent of Vedic accent and exclusively determined by syllable weight, so that metrically, the pada reads as

-.--.-.x (viz., the second half-pada is iambic).

In some cases, however, an accented syllable was suppressed in the redaction of the samhita, so that an anudātta may be immediately followed by an svarita (a so-called "independent svarita"). In such cases, the svarita syllable will be marked with a grave accent.

For example in RV 1.10.8c,

U-S-U-S-A-A-A-U

¯\¯\___¯

became

U-S-S-A-A-A-S

¯\\___¯

There are four variants of independent svarita, viz. ' (as in ' for ', the case of the example above), ' (as in ' for '), , ' (as in ' for '), or ' (with avagraha, as in ' for '). Independent svarita occurs in some 1300 instances in the Rigveda, or in ca. 5% of all padas.

External links

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• http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/vedic/Vedic_accents_doc.pdf

Sanskrit | Phonology