[B-Greek] Speaking Greek CD--Stress
MMB
marmarbrandl2 at iprimus.com.au
Thu Oct 23 17:23:29 EDT 2008
Randall Buth wrote:
> I have a comment on their comments on stress... .
>
> I found the following curious:
>
> "In the course of time the musical accent yielded, certainly by the
> fourth
> century AD, to a stress accent, with which we feel much more at home as
> English speakers and its stress accents prevail still in modern Greek.
> Given
> the practical difficulties for English speakers of attempting a musical
> accent over long stretches of text, we have used exclusively, and hope
> more
> or less consistently, a stress accent in the recorded extracts."
>
> The dating mentioned here seems misleading.
> Most linguistic studies that try to explain the post-Alexander Greek
> vowel shift attribute it to a collapse of length in the vowel system,
> with a corresponding collapse of circumflex vs. high tone distinction,
> resulting in what would be called a stress accent. (Stress accent
> results in a simple two tone 'high/low' system without length
> distinction.)
>
> What all of this means is that the pitch accent dropped out of normal
> Greek during the 3-2 c BCE. That some grammarians discussed it,
> maybe even practised it in school, into the Christian era is not
> surprising, but hardly definitive. We have teachers who will read
> "Chaucer".
>
> I have only heard the Daitz recordings with a pitch accent, though I
> look forward to listening to these. (I've requested a review copy)
> I have a friend that I speak Koine with, uses a pitch accent,
> and it is easy enough to follow though not completely consistent.
> He distinguishes OKSYTONOS from PERISPVMENOS but does
> not generally drop the BARYTONOS like the old grammarians say.
> Personally, I use a stress (high tone for both OKSYTONOS and
> PERISPWMENOS) because of a primary interest in KOINH.
I found these comments most helpful, thank you. And I will be
interested in what you think once you have had time to review the
"Speaking Greek" CD.
Maria Brandl
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