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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sun Jul 19 20:59:34 EDT 2009


On Jul 19, 2009, at 7:15 PM, Eric S. Weiss wrote:

>
> But doesn't this basic rule of Contonation and Mora also largely  
> apply to
> Koinê Greek accent rules? I.e., isn't it a basic principle that still
> explains much of the reason for how Koinê Greek and the NT is  
> accented?
>
> I.e., instead of reading D. A. Carson's 167-page book, if a person  
> wants
> to do accents basically correctly (primarily to know how the accent  
> shifts
> so as to know what syllable to accentuate because of the way noun  
> and verb
> accents move or don't move), isn't knowing Mastronarde's rule plus the
> basic 5 or so rules that Mounce, Black, et al., print or give, going  
> to
> benefit them?

So far as I can tell -- and I may be wrong here -- the accentuation of  
the text of the GNT has been carried out by editors following the  
rules for Attic Greek -- which had a pitch accent, and which also had  
differentiated short and long vowels and diphthongs. In the Koine  
pronunciation we have the impact of Itacism and also the loss of a  
differentiation between length of long and short vowels (I don't know  
whether that applies to all vowels which differentiated long and short  
quantities in Attic or not. If vowel quantities on A, I, and U are not  
differentiated and the diphthongs EU and OU are, in the right  
configurations, pronounced EV or EF and OV or OF, then it's hard to  
see how rules regarding a circumflex on a long syllable or diphthong  
would be very meaningful. I don't know, but I think that the scheme of  
Attic accentuation applied to the probably pronunciation of Koine  
vowels and diphthongs is very problematic.

I would very much like to see Randall's "interesting things to add."
Look at BDF §13 "The system of symbols to help in reading aloud  
(accents, breathings, etc.) was developed by the Alexandrian  
grammarians and was first employed in older (dialectal) poetic texts.  
It was applied systematically to prose texts for the first time in the  
period of the minuscules.  ... " It looks very much like the system of  
accentuation developed by Alexandrian grammarians for classical Attic  
came to be applied to the text of the NT, a text composed in a Greek  
with a considerably different phonetic complexion..

In John 1:1a  ἦν [H)/N], the circumflexed Eta in terms of Attic  
accentuation is an Eta that is pronounced as a stretched out vowel,  
first with a rising pitch acute and then with a falling pitch grave; I  
would guess that the Koine pronunciation might more accurately be  
represented if the word were spelled ην (since it's a monosyllable,  
there's no need for an accent at all, and since aspiration has been  
lost, there's also no need to mark the smooth breathing; otherwise we  
might write ἤν [H)/N].
I'm speculating, of course. But I'm supposing that the diacriticals of  
our GNT would look very different if the accentuation of Classical  
Attic were not being imposed on it in our printed editions.

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

> --- On Sun, 7/19/09, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
>> Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Absurdity of Koine Greek accents (was  
>> "Allegory about learning Koine Greek")
>> To: "Eric S. Weiss" <papaweiss1 at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: "b-greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
>> Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009, 5:47 PM
>>
>> On Jul 19, 2009, at 5:56 PM, Eric S. Weiss wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>> From Unit Two, Section 4, p. 17 of Introduction to
>> Attic Greek, by Donald
>>> J. Mastronarde:
>>
>> Attic Greek accentuation is one thing, Koine Greek
>> another.




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