"His novel."
Translation:Το μυθιστόρημα του.
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because the accent is on the antepenultimate (the third syllable from the end) there should be a second accent on the last syllable because of the pronoun "του": "his novel" = "το μυθιστόρημά του"
That is true, but technical limitations make it difficult for the course maintainers to include such sentences as the default spelling.
The correct spelling should be accepted as they usually add them as alternate translations (which do not have those limitations).
No problem! The maintainers of all DL courses are doing an excellent (and much appreciative) job... I think it's discussions like this that help people dive deeper into grammar rules.
What exactly is the reason for that? It makes sense from the phonetical point of view but is it a rule in the Greek spelling system?
I am not an expert and I don't know if there is a grammar rule for it, but Greek is very phonetic language... you pronounce what you read... accents help specify which syllable gets slightly more stress. In this case two syllables in the word μυθιστόρημα should be pronounced with slightly higher stress. Paying extra attention on how I read the sentence (I am a Greek native speaker) I notice that Ι stress the syllable "στο" slightly more than the syllable "μα" and (of course) much less all the other syllables... don't ask me why...
Yes, it's a spelling rule as well.
(There also used to be a rule about an additional accent on the ultimate if the penultimate has a circumflex accent, but this was dropped -- perhaps because this was not reflected in pronunciation, since acute, grave, and circumflex accents have been pronounced identically for centuries and centuries now, and we don't write them separately anymore, either, since 1981 or so if I recall correctly.)
Because a possessive noun μου, σου, ... is treated as an extension of the noun and the stress cannot be futher from the end than 3 syllables: η ιστορί-α-του, is ok, accent on the third syllable from the end BUT το μυθι-στό-ρη-μα-του needs an accent on -μα
