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. Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. ... Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts of India. ... Sanskrit grammatical tradition (, one of the six Vedanga disciplines) begins in late Vedic India, and culminates in the AṣṭādhyāyÄ« of Pāṇini (ca. ... The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) (more commonly known as an uppen) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans, and other languages. ... The Rigveda (Sanskrit: , a tatpurusha compound of praise, verse and knowledge) is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. ...

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 This article is about the baked good, for other uses see Pie (disambiguation). ... The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ... A pada ( foot) in Sanskrit poetic meter (chandas) is a quarter of a full verse (the foot of a quadruped being one out of four), e. ... The Rigveda (Sanskrit: , a tatpurusha compound of praise, verse and knowledge) is a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. ...

agním īḍe puróhitaṃ

"Agni I laud, the high priest."

means that the eight syllables have an intonation of Agni is a Hindu deity. ... The priests of Vedic religion, known as purohita, are divided into several types: The Hotar is the chief priest, presiding the sacrifice. ...

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

or iconically,

_¯__¯_

Note that īḍe, 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 The verses of the Vedas have a variety of different meters. ...

-.--.-.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. An iamb is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. ... The Samhita (Sanskrit: joined or collected) is the basic text of each of the Vedas, comprising collections of hymns and ritual texts. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages. ...

For example in RV 1.10.8c,

jéṣaḥ súvarvatīr apá

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

¯¯___¯

became

jéṣaḥ svàrvatīr apá

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

¯___¯

There are four variants of independent svarita, viz. jātya (as in kvà for kúa, the case of the example above), kṣaipra (as in vy-ā̂pta for ví-āpta), , praśliṣṭa (as in divī̂va for diví-iva), or abhinihita (with avagraha, as in té-'bruvan for té-abruvan). Independent svarita occurs in some 1300 instances in the Rigveda, or in ca. 5% of all padas.

External links

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

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