[B-Greek] Absurdity of Koine Greek accents (was "Allegory about learning Koine Greek")

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Jul 19 15:40:20 EDT 2009


On Jul 19, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Mark Lightman wrote:

> ...t I
> am convinced that one of the reasons Koine is so
> hard to learn and to internalize is because the accents
> jump all over the place according to rules which are so
> complicated that they are virtually impossible to master.

A fundamental absurdity about our printed texts (and, of course --  
unfortunately -- our textbooks and reference books) of Koine Greek is  
that they use all three of the accent marks that were invented to  
represent a pitch accent which was no longer used in the Koine. It  
would make far more sense to print Koine Greek texts in the same  
manner as modern Greek is written today: monotonically -- with an  
acute on the stressed syllable of each word. It is important to know  
where the accent is on Koine words, but it is not important to know  
whether that accent is acute or grave or circumflex. Does anyone at  
all attempt to read Koine Greek with a pitch accent? If there is, I'd  
like to know the reason for doing so.

I heartily agree that the rules for polytonic accentuation are  
"virtually impossible to master" -- and what's more, I don't believe  
that there's any good pedagogical reason to master them. Monotonic  
accents would be quite sufficient to aid pronunciation, and where the  
accents make a difference in word recognition, a monotonic accents  
would serve as well as or better than the polytonic accent.

So why are we saddled with this polytonic accentual system? Tertullian  
was talking about his faith, but the reason he gave is the only one we  
can give for our persistence in learning and teaching and writing  
these accents on our transcripts of Koine Greek texts: QUIA ABSURDUM  
EST -- because it makes no sense at all. Look at the papyri and the  
Greek texts there: you won't find any accents at all.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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