[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 11 16:55:48 EDT 2010


Louis wrote
<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...>

Hi, Louis,

Defenders  of Greek accents will often point out the few words where accents  
affect meaning, but as a  practical matter, in actual communication,  no one is 
going to confuse  the words you site here.  My point is exactly that putting the 
stress on  the "wrong" syllable does NOT hinder communication, in English or in  
Greek.  Often it does the opposite, i.e when one ignores the rules of  enclitics 
and puts the stress on a word like OU or SOU for emphasis.   When we decided to 
drop the tones, it made Greek easier, not harder.  If  we dropped, or modified 
the stresses, it would make Greek easier, not  harder to learn and to speak.  
Again, I ask you to ask yourself how much  of your time in learning Greek is 
spent on getting the accents correct,  and whether this is worth any advantage 
there might be in not confusing  a few words.   And any change in the accent 
system could be modified to  deal with a few forms otherwise pronounced the 
same. 


Again, my  personal practice is to try to the get the accents correct, but if  
someone wants to just ignore them, I see no evidence that they won't  learn 
Greek just as well, and I will be happy to communicate with them  whether they 
follow the accents rules or not.

By the way, τἰ and τι is a particularly bad example, because word order always 
distinguishes the two.

 
 Mark L



FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: Louis Sorenson <llsorenson at hotmail.com>
To: Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>; prittman at gmail.com; B-Greek List 
mail to all <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sat, September 11, 2010 1:53:38 PM
Subject: RE: Accents in Ancient Greek

 (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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