The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit is traditionally divided by Sanskrit grammarians into three qualities, udātta "raised" (acute accent), anudātta "not raised" (grave accent) and svarita "sounded" (circumflex). 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. ... 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 A slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie à la mode A pie is a baked dish, with a baked shell usually made of pastry that covers or completely contains a filling of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, cheeses, creams, chocolate, custards, nuts, or other sweet or savoury ingredients. ... 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

means that the eight syllables have an intonation of

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

(where A=anudātta, U=udātta, S=svarita). 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 in terms of pitch, the above verse may be represented as _¯__¯_ while metrically, in terms of syllable length, it reads as -.--.-.x (viz., the second half-pada is iambic). The verses of the Vedas have a variety of different meters. ... An iamb is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. ...

In some cases, however, a sounded syllable was suppressed in 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. 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 times in the Rigveda, or in 5% of all padas.

External links

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