value of accents?
dhwarren at attglobal.net
dhwarren at attglobal.net
Tue Jun 4 05:35:08 EDT 2002
Eric Weiss wrote:
> Bottom-line: I did not find a reason to purchase and study Carson's
> book, as he did not convince me that learning more than I already know
> about accents was necessary. I was taught and use Carson's preferred
> method of consistently pronouncing NT words with the stress on the
> accented syllable.
>
> Can anyone convince me of the necessity of learning accents more than
> what is briefly given in most 1st-year NT grammars?
I think that true scholars must draw the line somewhere. There are indeed some things
that we must not waste our precious time on learning. After all, as Mr. Weiss astutely
points out elsewhere in his post, the accent marks eventually lost their significance
as tone/pitch indicators. There is no reason today to differentiate the accute from
the circumflex and the grave. This explains why today in Demotiki one finds only the
accute in use, if one finds an accent mark at all.
Of course, some students will never have the opportunity to develop their mastery of
Greek beyond the first or second year. I always encourage all of my students to gain
as much knowledge of Greek as they can. But of course we are concerned here with those
who want to go on to be scholars of the language, those whose thirst for knowledge
knows no bounds. Should we not recognize the fact that for us today these little ink
marks called "accents" are about as useless as teats on a boar? Sure, they may help us
in distinguishing some words. They can tell us when ALLA means "but" and when it means
"other things," or when NOMOS means "law" and when it means "pasture," or when CEIRWN
means "worse" and when it is merely the gen. pl. of the noun for "hands." But even the
accent alone will not always help us in distinguishing some words. For example, it is
the diaeresis that tells us when DAIS means "firebrand" and when it means "banquet,"
not the accent. For both words have the very same accent over the very same letter!
And it is the rough breathing that tells us when EKTOS is the ordinal "sixth" rather
than the adverb "outside." And of course nothing distinguishes GNWSIN as the acc. sg.
of the noun from the homograph found in Josh 3:7 LXX, where the context alone tells us
that here it is a verb form and not a noun at all.
So of what value are the accents? I think that those of us who wish to be true
scholars of the Greek language must draw the line somewhere. We simply can't learn
everything there is about the language, nor should we even try. We cannot clutter up
our minds with a lot of detailed rules like those given by Don Carson in his book
_Greek Accents: A Student's Manual_. I must confess that I foolishly bought his book
back on July 22, 1986, for the outrageous sum of $8.95. I then thoughtlessly spent the
rest of that summer devouring its contents, frittering away my time learning all the
accent rules and working out the exercises to each lesson. Perhaps it increased my
understanding of some aspects of the language. I cannot tell today, for it has been
too long ago. My purpose was not so utilitarian then. I simply wanted to learn
everything that I could about the Greek language. Being young and foolish, I did not
prudently stop to consider whether it was really worth all my time and effort. I
simply wanted to understand what those marks were, and why they were there. But have I
really gained a return on all the time that I invested back then?
There were of course times in later classes when I could explain to a fellow student
why an accent shifted from the antepenult in one form of a given word to the penult of
another, or why it had changed from an accute to a circumflex. But did these
opportunities really benefit me in some way? Since I wasn't doing it for show or to
demonstrate my superiority in learning, what good was this knowledge to me?
I can think of only one instance as a student when I really gained something
empirically demonstrable from all my knowledge of the accent rules. At Harvard in the
winter of 1994, my professor François Bovon needed someone to type in all the accent
marks for his book _New Testament Traditions and Apocryphal Narratives_ (trans. Jane
Haapiseva-Hunter; Princeton Theological Monographs 36; Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick,
1995). (Bovon himself knew the accent rules well, but he simply did not have the time
to spend on inserting them; the typesetter at Pickwick had chosen to ignore the
accents in producing the book.) I gladly accepted the job and did the work in my spare
time during the Christmas break. The work of typing in the accents went quickly, since
I already knew all the rules. Only rarely did I feel the need to stop and look
something up in order to check that my accenting was correct. To my surprise, the head
of Pickwick Publications, Dikran Y. Hadidian, paid me a handsome sum for my work. It
repaid several times over my modest investment in Carson's book eight year earlier.
But then, was it really worth it? After all, perhaps we could lower the price of books
if we scholars would simply draw the line and protest: No more accents! We could
insist that every Greek New Testament--indeed every book that has any Greek in
it--follow the practice of Robinson and Pierpont in their monumental _The New
Testament in the Original Greek according to the Byzantine/Majority Textform_ and
simply dispense with the accents and breathing marks altogether (their absence makes
this book look more scholarly, don't you think?).
Of course, it would make vocalizing the text a little more difficult for beginners. I
mean, without accents how would beginning students know where to place the stress?
Perhaps we could use the rules of Latin pronunciation, as they did in the time of
Erasmus. Or perhaps we could teach students to stress the first syllable as in German,
or the last syllable as in Hebrew. But then there are exceptions to the rules even in
these languages. Yet if students must memorize where the stress should fall in every
Greek form for each word, then aren't we only defeating the purpose of dispensing with
the accents in order to save them some time in learning Greek? But if we continue to
print the accents as an aid to pronunciation, then that means that we must still have
somebody around who understands the rules. Perhaps we should just let students
pronounce the Greek words any way that they see fit. So what if students pronounce the
same word differently? After all, variety is the spice of life, right?
And think of the money that could be saved? Assuming that some scholars were much
wiser than I and so never wasted their time in learning the accents, if we dispense
with the accents, publishers would no longer have to hunt for someone foolish enough
to have learned all those rules. And of course publishers have to pay these guys for
their time spent in inserting all these useless vestiges from antiquity. And this only
raises the price of the book.
And if we will only get rid of the accents and breathings, think of the ink that could
be saved!
No, no! Accent rules only clutter the mind, and accent marks only clutter the page. I
hereby call on all Greek scholars everywhere to unite. Let us join together in
banishing forever these wicked little black strokes along with their accursed rules!
It's all a waste of time, I tell you, a terrible waste. Let us all with one voice
insist that henceforth all authors and all publishers cease and desist this baneful
practice immediately. Once the accents are no longer used, perhaps students will lose
interest in them. Of course, some inquisitive students will find them used in older
books or even in some ancient and in nearly all medieval manuscripts, and they are
bound to ask what the marks are for. But we teachers will just have to insist that
they are of no importance at all. It is the only way to save future generations of
scholars from the needless waste of time required to master these tedious rules with
all their multifarious exceptions.
"Carson suggests that those who learn NT Greek primarily for preaching purposes can do
all right with methods like Wenham's, but the serious scholarly student needs to learn
the accent system." Huh! That's a bunch of claptrap. It just sounds to me like an
ingenious way for Carson to earn a fast buck on book sales. We scholars need to draw
the line somewhere. I say, Let's do away with all those accent and breathing marks,
and the diaereses to boot. It may take a couple of years, but if we all band together
in protest, we can do it. And after that, then we can think about getting rid of all
those nasty little subscripts!
David H. Warren
Prof. of NT and Greek
Freed-Hardeman University
Henderson, Tenn.
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