[B-Greek] Why Monotonic Greek. Was: Free Polytonic Uncial GreekUnicode Font?
Kevin Riley
klriley at alphalink.com.au
Thu Aug 10 19:09:38 EDT 2006
Just a few comments: It has been suggested [I forget by whom] that the
diacritics were necessary *because* native speakers no longer used tonal
accents and therefore foreigners [and young native speakers] no longer could
learn the tones from hearing native speakers. The tones were kept in formal
reading after they were lost in speech. Once they became part of the
classical' texts they became part of the great devotion some Greeks felt for
the classical language - which is why it took until the 1970's to remove
them even though they had been irrelevant to reading and speaking for about
2 millenia. That after independence the Greeks could take serious a
movement to reconstruct their language on classical lines (Katharevousa)
shows the strength of conservatism in Greek life. The Greeks actually took
a move English speakers resist - conforming writing to speech - when they
removed the breathings and all but the acute accent. They never took the
next step of spelling reform by spelling the words as they are pronounced, e
g replacing H, U, EI, etc by I. The problem with both the Greek accents and
the Massoretic pointing is that neither were introduced when the texts were
written. Had the Greeks notated accent in the classical period, or the
Hebrews written with vowels from the time of Moses onward, we would have
more confidence in their correctness. As it is, both probably represent a
received tradition, and are probably accurate most of the time. Both tend
to overlook the fact that the texts were written over centuries and
therefore tones/vowels may have changed.
BTW after the first generation - and after all significant texts had been
transliterated - writing both Greek and English phonetically would likely be
considered a great advance rather than 'dumb'. Anyone who has learnt a
foreign language that is phonetic can appreciate the labour saved when you
don't have to memorise spelling. Comparing writing Greek with polytonic
accents to writing English in IPA does not really make the point you want to
make.
Kevin Riley
-------Original Message-------
From: Curtis Hinson
Date: 08/11/06 02:51:37
Greetings George,
It appears you may have missed my points. I will try to clarify since I
may have been unclear about it.
1. The breathing marks changes which meaning that eta has, and the
reading of most major translations suggest that it has been read by them
differently than most critical editions.
2. The original reason diacritical markings were created was to help
foreigners learning Greek know how to pronounce the language.
3. Since then the breathing marks are not original to the text and the
language, either way it's an editorial decision.
4. So then it might be better to let the reader make contextual
decisions rather than pre-judging the issue for them.
That is my reasoning, explained one way, on why diacriticals are an
unnecessary addition to the language. Greece agrees with me.
Now, I brought up IPA as a way of explaining how polytonic came to be in
the first place, to draw an analogy. Diacriticals were indeed about the
sounds; it is a side-effect of them that they also effect the way we
understand texts. So, just like writing English in phonetic notation
all the time would be considered dumb and a burden for English were
anyone to suggest it, so having to use diacriticals was discarded by
Greeks as dumb and burdensome. And a side-effect of following the
Greeks in not printing diacriticals in critical editions, and not
forcing students to write Greek using them all the time, is that we
remove a layer of potential editorializing from our texts, as well as
simplify our pedagogy.
I am sorry if this is a complex or convoluted point. Allow me to draw
another comparison. In Hebrew, the language is vowel-less. So a reader
has to understand what vowels to fill into the word, using context,
tradition, or whatever. In their day the Massoretes added vowel
markings to the text, thereby fixing a traditional reading of the word.
Usually they're probably right, but from time to time, they may well be
wrong, and the wrong vowel marking changes the word we see and therefore
the meaning of the whole verse.
There are therefore many who prefer to read the unpointed Hebrew in
order that the reader is left in the living process of discovering what
the word should be without any pre-judgement. I'm saying likewise, we
ought to allow students and readers of the GNT to be involved in that
process by not spoon-feeding them someone else's editorial judgement.
After all, if you want editorial judgement, go read a translation.
Bless the Name
Curtis Hinson
http://curtishinson.com
P.S. It's also interesting to me that the diacriticals were invented
two or three centuries after prosody started to die in Greek. Maybe
they were intended at first to help speakers understand the prosody of
ancient Greek plays wherein it was an important feature. It seems like
the decision many centuries later to start using the diacriticals on the
NT text was probably an ignorant one in any case, since the Koine didn't
need it. I suppose the internationalization of Greek, so to speak,
might have had something to do with the death of prosody. I am
suspicious of the motives of using polytonic in printing the NT, since
it's so easy to use the markings to pursue a theological agenda.
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