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

Eric S. Weiss papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 20 08:57:14 EDT 2009


I was thinking this morning that those of us who recommend using a historically proper 
pronunciation for Koinê Greek - i.e., Randall Buth's Phonemic Koinê or even Modern Greek 
(what Caragounis calls the Historical Pronunciation) - should be similarly consistent when it 
comes to accents. 
 
I.e., since the "accent" in Koinê times only represented stress and not (i.e., no longer) 
pitch, then a simple stress accent (like is done in Modern Greek) is what Koinê/NT texts 
should have, and the basic "rules" we teach or use re: when to use an acute vs. circumflex 
vs. grave accent should be rewritten to discuss only one kind of accent (i.e., a stress 
mark), and explain the shifts in stress, rather than explain when a circumflex is used, when 
an acute changes to grave, etc. 
 
I would guess that vowel length and nouns tending to be persistent and verbs tending to be 
recessive when it comes to accents would still be part of these "stress accent rules."
 
What remains, then, is what to do with the breathing marks. Should they be retained to 
differentiate between words, or should they, like the different shapes/kinds of 
accents, likewise be dropped since they no longer affected pronunciation. Were breathing 
marks used in texts from Koinê times by Koinê writers?
 
- - -
Eric S. Weiss 


      


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