[B-Greek] Absurdity of Koine Greek accents (was "Allegory about learning Koine Greek")
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Mon Jul 20 10:57:41 EDT 2009
I've got a couple minutes and this is an interesting thread I've not yet read.
basically, the Greek accent system is written for fast speech.
Note all of the final TONOS
that become BARYTONOS when a word follows. Those same
words have their own accent when phrase final or in a list.
However, there is a difference with PERISPOMENOS. It retains its accent
at the end of a word. So a word like TON and TWN would actually be
differentiated in fluent speech. It means that even 'stress' Greek may have
had a 'sing-songy' sound to outsiders by maintaining certain words, and
certain morphemes, with a pertpetual 'high' tone. Was this real? I don't
know, it is just how the accent system works out when applied to a
KOINH text.
A second point is that the Greek accent system is artificial and does not
take account of information structure. My best guess is that the TONOS to
BARYTONOS rule would not apply to Focal items. But this is not part of
the accent system itself.
point three: several of us here when writing emails to each other find it
easy to write without any accents and it is not difficult to read correctly
accented--provided one already knows the word as accented, and this
even applies to verbs and changing accent positions of nouns with
final 'long' vowels. I know that writing-plain is frowned upon in Greek
circles but the ancients lived with this quite nicely. So for publication of
course I write the little squiggles, but for notes I just write.
point 4: there are several ironies in the history of Greek. For example,
poor ERODOTOS pronounced his name in an appropriately French
style, without 'h', but he is remembered by one and all as Herodotos.
and no one was writing the DASEIA on ancient letters and notes.
Randall
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list