[B-Greek] Questions regarding accentuation

Vasile Stancu stancu at mail.dnttm.ro
Sat Jul 19 06:41:11 EDT 2008


1. Mastronarde says (1:2), "By 400 C.E. a stress accent had fully supplanted
the pitch accent".

 

Question a: How can such a fact be proven? Or, at least, supposed?

 

Question b: Somebody who has some musical sense/training, please try to
utter a sentence for yourself in whatever language, with pure stress accent
(please control the pitch so as to keep it at the same level). I have tried
this and the result is something very strange... I do not know of a language
today where people should normally employ such kind of accent.

 

2. Mastronarde says (1:3), "One approach to pronounciation by a modern
student of the language is to ignore the accent; but for mnemonic purposes
it is more practical and helpful to give a slight stress to the accented
syllable".

 

Question: Would it be not useful - also for mnemonic purposes - to
differentiate between the way an acute is modifying pronounciation as
compared with the circumflex, since, for example, Mastronarde says at 1:7,
"If long and accented, U may have a circumflex ... or an acute ... In this
case the type of accent must be learned for each word or particular form".

 

Vasile STANCU




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