[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek
Louis Sorenson
llsorenson at hotmail.com
Sat Sep 11 15:53:38 EDT 2010
(Note: To view the Greek characters and accents correctly, you may view this message in the archives at
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2010-September/ under the RE: Accents in Ancient Greek thread).
Mark wrote
>But this brings me to question two. I have argued that there is really no
>reason to put the accents and diacriticals in when typing Greek because on most
>on line forums, the font is too small to really see the accents clearly. If
>anything, they make the Greek harder to read.
I have a new mobile phone with internet on it -- if there are accents in a word
the email client shows it incorrectly (sqare boxes). I'm not sure if this mobile
feature (lack of utf-8 support or font feature is on all phones or not.) In this
case I can read unaccented/diacritical free words with ease.
Mark wrote:
>I have no doubt that the current system of accenting Greek--and I have not even
>gone into the silliness of retaining the circumflex and the grave and the smooth
>breathing--makes learning Greek much harder than it would be if we scrapped the
>current system in favor of any other system or no system at all. My only
>question is, how much harder does it make it. Maybe 15% harder than it needs to
>be.
>When I first started learning Greek, I did not pay much attention to Greek
>accents. Now that I am focusing on speaking it, I am trying to internalize the
>current accent system. I'm getting there. It's a lot mental energy that I
>would rather spend on learning more vocab, but I'm doing it not because I think
>it will help my Greek, but because...everyone else does it.
When you are hearing Greek, accents matter -- your mind does not have to say "where
is the word stressed? because we accent words differently in the English language
and can accept the idea that words which are accented differently can mean
different things. Which is exactly what happens in Greek.
επιτέλει επιτελεῖ mean two different things.
τί τι mean two different things
βασίλεια βασιλεῖα mean two different things.
γαλῆν γαλήν' mean two different things.
εἶμι εἰμί mean two different things.
ἦ ἡ ᾗ ἢ ἣ mean different things.
Get used to it. Accents in Greek contain lexical information (are phonemic components).
They contain more than just emphasis. When you write you don't need to add them,
but if you want to avoid ambiguity, you will use them when needed. If you say a word,
say it accented correctly so everyone can understand and so Modern Greeks won't call
you MORE. From what I understand, most accents are on the same syllable in modern Greek - but there are some
changes from the old Greek.
Louis Sorenson
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