I have been studying Attic Greek for a few years now, and one aspect of it has given me endless trouble - rules of accentuation.
The rules (for most cases) were finally clearly explained to me in an excellent textbook entitled “Learn to Read Greek” by Andrew Keller and Stephanie Russel.
Following is their succinct summarization:
a = antepenult u = ultima p = penult
- a p ù if u is followed by another word
- a p ú if u is followed by pause punctuation
- a ṕ u not possible if p long and u short
- á p u if the u is short
- a p ũ if the u is long
- a †p ŭ if p is long and accented and u is short
† Please note that the penult in rule six should be marked with a circumflex, but is not because I couldn’t find any such unicode character after long and fruitless googling.