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

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Jul 20 10:21:48 EDT 2009


On Jul 20, 2009, at 9:20 AM, Sarah Madden wrote:

> Eric --
> In defense of the current system of accents, one thing I like about  
> the
> circumflex accent is those situations where the circumflex is a  
> subtle clue
> that certain letters (vowels) have been subsumed under a stronger
> letter (e.g., in the article's dative case or contract verbs).

Well, yes -- but even here these spellings present an obsolete  
pronunciation: the iota-subscripts are remnants  of an obsolete long- 
vowel diphthong; the circumflex over contracted syllables are  
reminders of long-obsolete adjacent vowels and even earlier evanescent  
consonants between those vowels. I don't think there's any evidence  
that the "contract" vowels were ever pronounced POIE-W and AGAPA-W and  
DHLO-W in extant literature. Our conventional representation of the  
Greek text in a GNT is essnetially a monument to the way Greek is, to  
a considerable extent, NOT pronounced.

> While we're on this topic, I would suggest another thought: I have  
> often
> wondered why there is a soft-breathing mark. Why not only use the
> rough-breathing mark?

That's of course what we do in our B-Greek transliteration. The smooth  
breathing serves no useful purpose and there's some question whether  
initial aspiration still obtained in NT Koine. The tradtional  
explanation for the forms of the breathing mark is that they derive  
from front and back halves of a "H" (which was used in some dialects  
to represent aspiration as in the Roman alphabet. See Smyth §1.1.3  : http://tiny.cc/X9CHX


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

> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Eric S. Weiss  
> <papaweiss1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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