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Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
- idoubtit 5y agoWhen I had to write Polytonic Greek, I had to write my own vim plugin that would transliterate on demand. For instance, while in insert mode h''als<alt-g> turns into ἃλς. It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us, but we should not forget that the words with different accents sounded differently, so it was probably not confusing to native speakers. Moreover, every language has its homophonies (the English "Dick" is not just a first name), and many near-homophonies for strangers (Japanese untrained ears can't distinguish "r" from "l", and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words). A nitpick about the article: a paragraph about the other main diacritics would have given more context. The breathing marks chang the pronunciation as much as the accents did. And since Roman languages are not tonal languages, they kept the breathing as a "h" but dropped the tones.
- oytis 5y ago> and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words Unaccented "o" and "a" are exact homophones, Russian children are trained in school to memorize the spelling in order to differentiate between the two.
- bloak 5y agoThey may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both English and German, for example, have almost-homophones that children typically learn to distinguish by learning the spelling rather than by hearing the subtle difference in pronunciation? If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I suppose it's an interesting phenomenon that some (but not all?) languages have subtle phonetic differences that even native speakers cannot always easily distinguish.
- yorwba 5y ago> If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. E.g. take the example on page 2 of http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminare/sse_stufen.pdf http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminar... : LOITETOTSUFARENiSTLBÖD. In Standard German, that would be "Leute totzufahren ist blöd." Except for switching L and B, the original isn't wrong about the pronunciation: <eu> represents [ɔʏ] and <z> represents [ts], so using <oi> and <ts> instead is perfectly reasonable.
- tremon 5y agoIt doesn't seem perfectly reasonable to me. Using "totsufaren" instead of the correct spelling because the 't' sound is already in 'tot' destroys consistency with hinzufahren, auszufahren. And I'm not convinced that 'oi' and 'eu' represent the same sound in German, since 'eu' is a diphthong and always sounds long, whereas 'oi' is a short vowel followed by a glide: [oᶦ].
- bloak 5y ago> I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. Represent the pronunciation accurately, or the children's pronunciation accurately? It's a bit more interesting in English because a common mistake in English is to pronounce a word as it's spelt. For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent ... OK, that's me being prescriptive, but well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. I suppose parents and teachers have different incentives here: parents want their children to resemble them, make a good impression, and sound educated; teachers want the children in their care to get good marks in written tests and exams. Knowing how to spell diarrhoea is less important nowadays in real life, because of computers. If you don't want to look stupid you still have to know it's guerrilla marketing rather than gorilla marketing, though. Computer will tell you how many Rs in guerrilla.
- Grustaf 5y agoWell, you can very often deduce which one it is from cognate words, or general language patterns, so it's not just rote learning. e.g. this random headline from Pravda today: "Байден намерен обсудить поведение России на встрече с Путиным" NAMEREN - obviously a, since NA is a common prefix OBSUDIT' - obviously o, since OB is a common prefix POVEDENIE - obviously o, since PO is a common prefix ROSSII - hopefully you can spell the name of your country... or if you don't know how to spell OPRAVDAT' (justify) which has its stress on the ultimate syllable, you just need to recall the name of the glorious newspaper above, PRAVDA, where the stress is on the first A. or GOROD is easy to spell because -oro- is a very common cluster.
- AntigoneJournal 5y agoMany thanks for this. Yes, a fuller article would make mention of 'crasis' - where two successive words are melded into one utterance - which inevitably affected pitch and accentuation. As to breathings, their affect on pitch (as opposed to pronunciation) was null: the rough was a mere aspirate, and the 'smooth' was in effect the absence of any aspirate. Latin, as a fellow Indo-European language, had inherited initial aspirates, although these were fewer in number than in Greek, where rho and upsilon always had initial aspiration, and where Indo-European s- had become an aspirate (compare Lat. serpo with Gk herpo, or Lat. sal with your Greek hals.)
- Grustaf 5y ago> It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us I never laughed at this, it's not strange that there are words or word forms where the only difference is a single phonetic feature, or indeed where there is no difference at all. As you say that is the case in all languages. And regarding accents in Greek, I don't recall encountering any case where the position of the accent was the crux. Which isn't really surprising given that the texts didn't have accents originally, so the writers couldn't rely on that alone.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoIn Classical Greek, it isn't just the position of the accent that matters but the kind of accent there. You are right that the Greeks themselves did not need the accents notated, but students of Greek today often rely on the accent to tell e.g. the eta or eta+nu words apart.
- Grustaf 5y agoSure, I took 6 full-time terms of Classical Greek so I'm familiar with the different accents. But my Greek studies took place 20 years ago so I do wonder what you mean by eta and eta + nu words? Are these different subtypes of the third declension?
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoEta alone can mean ‘the’, ‘she who’, ‘either/or’, ‘indeed’, ‘than’, or ‘I was’, with the accent helping to narrow it down. Eta+nu is ‘her who’, ‘he/she/it was’, etc. Also, for example, tau+iota is either an interrogative or an indefinite pronoun, and it is the accent which tells you which without having to scan further through the sentence.
- Grustaf 5y agoOk, I thought you were talking about word endings. Well sure, there are minimal pairs, but most of the time it’s immediately clear from the context, and we have to keep in mind that the accents were added much later by modern philologists, so they have de facto been deduced from the context. But sure, there goldilocks zone where it’s not obvious to the lay reader, but the scholars are pretty certain what it should say, and then it helps. I wouldn’t say it’s a major struggle when reading Greek though.
- eloisius 5y agoEven accounting for tonally differentiated words, Mandarin Chinese is rife with exact homophones. Shì can be “is,” “try,” “thing,” “kind/style” and many more. It amazes me how we are able to pattern match so well provided a little context.
- dwheeler 5y agoIndeed. For an extreme example, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short poem in Classical Chinese in which every word is pronounced shi when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Ston...
- AntigoneJournal 5y agoThanks for sharing this. Antigone runs open-access articles on anything to do with the Greeks, Romans and what the world has made of them since. We are committed to two things: opening up Classics to as wide an audience as possible, especially autodidacts who could not study the subject at school or college; and having no paywall, no paid susbcription and no profit motive. If you're interested to see what we've run in our first few months, please take a look at https://antigonejournal.com/articles/ https://antigonejournal.com/articles/ If you think you could have a piece to write for us, see https://antigonejournal.com/contact/ https://antigonejournal.com/contact/ And if you can face the world of social media, we can be found at https://twitter.com/AntigoneJournal https://twitter.com/AntigoneJournal and https://www.facebook.com/antigoneclassics/ https://www.facebook.com/antigoneclassics/ Thanks for all of your interest and apologies for such a straight-up post.
- dash2 5y agoIs the musical about Greek accentuation, mentioned in footnote 25, still on Kickstarter? I couldn't find it.
- AntigoneJournal 5y agoWe never found it either - so there's a danger this may be a joke!
- dash2 5y agoYou have broken my heart.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI have some questions! (1) Rule #2 describes particles that do not have enough phonological weight to carry an accent of their own, so that they combine, for pronunciation purposes, with the word that follows them. Rule #10 then describes particles that display the identical behavior, except that they combine with the preceding word instead of the following word. To me, those would both be called "clitics", the term I know for a word which is phonologically dependent on another word while being grammatically independent. You name the second group as "enclitics" and have no name for the first group. Do you see them as being different phenomena? Why treat them so separately? (Actually, #2 appears to include #10 in that it mentions "a word that has two accents at different places", while the only example of such a thing arises from rule #10.) (2) I wanted to think of the accent location as being sensitive to morae rather than syllables. But the examples clearly show that while a long final syllable will drag an antepenultimate accent forward, a long penultimate syllable will not. Might you be able to talk about why that is?
- pixodaros 5y agoA philologist I know who likes teaching ancient languages actively just prefers to practice saying the words with rising (acut) or falling or rising and following (circumflex) pitch Yes, that does not explain why they are where they are, but ancient Greek has enough rules to memorize before you can read it! https://twitter.com/growe0/status/1401380230590132225 https://twitter.com/growe0/status/1401380230590132225
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- streamofdigits 5y agoIs there a trend of written language simplifying over the ages? (Greek and Chinese examples come to mind). Is there an objective way to measure / rank script complexity? Assuming its true, is it correlated with more people becoming literate over time (hence simplifying the educational process)?
- evnix 5y agoIndian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years but that is because of the very nature of the script. though I would agree, when it comes to Indian languages and their scripts, the symbols dont look any simpler but people tend not to use the entire set of consonant and vowel symbols available to them and only stick to using the simpler ones and likely the ones closer to English. another thing that I notice is that newer words don't have consonants followed by two or more consonants, the new words tend to look like stream of syllables with simple consonants followed by vowels.
- bregma 5y agoI would like to register my scepticism that Indian languages have not changed their pronunciation over multiple millennia. My wife had a professor from India who spoke Hindi as a mother tongue. His wife, also from India, also had Hindi as a mother tongue but was from a different village. The couple spoke only English at home because it was the only language they had in common. You do not get that kind of mutually-unintelligible divergence unless the language has had changes in pronunciation, and profound ones at that. It's quite possible that among a small subset of elites that languages have remained unchanged, but I think even that is highly unlikely. The Latin spoken by the educated elites of Europe at the time of the renaissance would have been unintelligble to someone on the streets of the eternal city during the republic. I suspect that such an assertion that the languages have remained unchanged for millennia is just simply not backed by facts.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years This is an ideological belief -- it is not even a theoretical possibility.
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- gadders 5y agoI work with a Greek lady, and tried to impress her with my Greek from Assassins Creed: Odyssey by saying "Chaire!" to her. Turns out it's archaic if not actually ancient Greek.
- AntigoneJournal 5y agoGood on you: it is perfectly fine Ancient Greek!
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhat kinds of sources do we use to determine how classical people said hello? Surviving plays? Correspondence? Speeches recorded in historical works?
- kylebgorman 5y agoGet W. Sidney Allen's slim text _Vox Graeca_. It goes over not only how Ancient Greek was pronounced but also how we know. The evidence includes explicit notes from grammarians and other writers, graffiti, borrowings, puns, and later forms of Greek. Allen also has another book _Vox Latina_ which does the same thing for Latin.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoBut I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.
- MonkeyClub 5y agoHello, A good source would be epistolography, another would be narration of encounters.
- billytetrud 5y agoInteresting. Would be cool to have audio clips for what it sounded like, especially with comparison to modern Greek (where possible)
- imbnwa 5y agoThis channel doesn't make the comparison and are short snippets from his full audiobooks, however its some of the best reconstructed ancient greek spoken by a specialist in this area https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv2q9OTZ0w4zCnt6NDjQZ-A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv2q9OTZ0w4zCnt6NDjQZ-A
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