[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 11 23:55:37 EDT 2010


Hi, Carl and Sarah,

The proposition that putting the stress on the wrong syllable interferes with 
communication in Greek and English has a certain logical appeal, but all I can 
say is that the empirical evidence that I have argues against it.   All my life 
I have heard English words accented on various syllables JuLY vesrus JUly, 
HARassment versus HaRASSment,  how do you like THEM apples versus how do like 
them APPles--and I can never remember a time when I did not understand what was 
being said based on where the stress was placed.  I think--I may be wrong, but I 
think--if you said to one hundred English speakers:  "George Bush was not 
particularly articulATE" one hundred of them would understand what you meant.

For Ancient Greek, the evidence I have is very sparse.  The only people I have 
heard who systematically place the accent on the wrong syllable are John Dobson 
and Maurice Robinson and I understand 100% of what they say.  Everyone I have 
heard who speaks Ancient Greek occasionally misplaces a stress, and I cannot 
recall a time where that in and of itself interfered with my ability to 
understand the Greek.  But maybe it's just me.  


 Mark L



FWSFOROS MARKOS




________________________________
From: Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
To: Mark Lightman <lightmanmark at yahoo.com>
Cc: Louis Sorenson <llsorenson at hotmail.com>; prittman at gmail.com; B-Greek List 
mail to all <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sat, September 11, 2010 7:01:53 PM
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek


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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