[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek

Sarah Madden sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
Sat Sep 11 22:38:09 EDT 2010


Carl --
Thanks for a reasoned description of why paying attention to accents makes
sense -- in any language. When the Greek grammar students I mentor meet with
me, I ask them to read out loud -- and I do correct mispronunciations as
well as misaccented words. I explain that "it hurts my ears" when they don't
pronounce the words correctly. They're newbies, and are quick to catch on to
this idea as something that will help their understanding.

Sarah

P.S. Update on my earlier note: My nephew is out of the hospital; he will
have surgery this week to fix his fractured facial bones. One strange fact:
He's a regular on that bus to Toronto, and usually sits in the very seats
where the four people were killed. Thank you to all you wrote to me offline
and for your prayers!
On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:

>
> On Sep 11, 2010, at 4:55 PM, Mark Lightman wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Quite frankly, I don't understand this argument at all. If our intercourse
> with
> Greek were nothing more than the reading and interpretation of a written
> text
> without any effort taken to vocalize the sequence of words or to experience
> in
> any way what was surely intended originally to be spoken by human lips and
> heard by human ears, then reading Greek would involve little more than
> deciphering
> a code of symbolic characters. But in fact the words and sentences we read
> were
> both sounded and heard by people who used the language and knew where the
> tones were supposed to fall and recognized those accented syllables as an
> essential
> part of the spoken language. And I would have to assume that speakers who
> pronounced the words with the tones where they belonged were better
> understood
> than were those who mispronounced them. So also I would think that speakers
> who attached the wrong endings for case and number to their nouns or for
> tense and voice and person and mood to their verbs were simply not
> understood
> very well. The accents -- at least the tonic syllables and the extra
> accents entailed
> by the enclitics -- are a part of how the words were pronounced by Greek
> speakers.
> A speaker who deviates regularly and consistently from the conventional
> placement
> of those accents risked being misunderstood by those with whom he or she
> sought
> to communicate. An English-speaker need not speak the Queen's English, but
> surely ought not to speak pidgin-English. And even if the intonation of
> words
> in Koine and Modern Greek is no longer the pitch-accent of Classical Attic,
> it's nevertheless that accentuation affects pronunciation and that getting
> the accent
> wrong means getting the pronunciation wrong. One really ought not to be
> speaking or reading Koine Greek as if it were a pidgin Greek.
>
> > 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.
>
> I think you can certainly write the Greek without marking the accented
> syllables
> properly -- but you cannot pronounce the Greek properly without accenting
> the
> right syllables of the words. That is as true in English as it is in Greek:
> we
> don't mark the accented syllables in "articulate" when we write the word,
> but
> we cannot pronounce "articulate" as an adjective properly unless we accent
> the
> second syllable of the word, nor can we pronounce "articulate" as a verb
> properly unless we accent the final syllable of the word. One simply cannot
> pronounce a word properly without knowing where its accent properly
> belongs.
>
> >
> > By the way, τἰ and τι is a particularly bad example, because word order
> always
> > distinguishes the two.
>
> Well, I'd have to say that intonation is essential to the way the
> interrogative
> sounds in a sequence in contradistinction to the way an indefinite sounds.
>
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>
> >
> > ________________________________
> > 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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>



-- 
Sarah ><>
sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
work: 301.429.8189



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