[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek

Nikolaos Adamou lets.read.the.bible.in.greek at gmail.com
Sun Sep 12 19:38:43 EDT 2010


Dear friends, it is nice to rejoin this blessed community that I
missed all summer.

William Harris, Prof. Em. Middlebury College, wrote an interesting essay:
THE MUSICAL PITCH ACCENTS IN GREEK, in
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/Greekaccents.html
related to the point discussed here.

Accents do indicate stress but a musical pitch.

 Dionysius Thrax (Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ) (170 BC‑90 BC), indicates that
“Tone (accent) is the resonance of a voice endowed with harmony.
It is heightened in the acute,
balanced (decreased) in the grave,
and broken (not broken but waived, heightened and then decreased) in
the circumflex.”

http://www.archive.org/stream/grammarofdionysi00dionuoft#page/4/mode/2up
For an English text,
http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante02/DionysiosThrax/dio_tech.html
for a Greek text

The fact that at that time manuscripts used uncials (capital letters)
without scripting the tone symbols, does not mean that we did not have
them, or
In oral communication were not used, by the Greeks.

Now days that ignorance let the Modern Greek state to use only the acute,
or 40 years ago when I was pupil, we were not writing grave,
but we substituted it with the acute,
does not mean that when one speaks or reads aloud Greek,
does not have the musicality of the Language.

Furthermore, accents make difference in distinguishing words that
otherwise have the same spelling.
For example, in LOGOS multimedia KALOS, καλὸς (good) is pronounced as
κάλος (calus).

Caragounis, in his 12 lessons audio CD about “How to pronounce Greek as a Greek”
gives the following list.

AMNHNOS        ἄκμνηνος        fasting from food             ἀκμηνὸς
  full-grown
AKRATOS          ἀκράτος        without being mixed         ἀκτατῶς
 in uncontrolled     manner
BATOS              βάτος          blamble-bush
βατὸς         verb adj: that can be passed
DEREIS              δέρεις        pres. Inf.
δερεῖν        fut. inf.
DEMOS             δήμος         people
δημὸς         fat
DIAIRW             διαίρω        lift up
 διαιρῶ       divide
DOKOS             δόκος         opinion
δοκὸς         beam
EDRANON         ἔδρανον      seat
ἀδρανὸν      neut. Adj: steady
EIMI                  εἶμι             go
      εἶμὶ             I am
ELEUSIS          ἔλευσις       coming
Ἐλευσὶς       Eleusis
ZHTW               ζήτω           long live (from ζάω)
ζητῶ          I seek
UEA                  θέα             view
      θεὰ             goddess
UERMH             θέρμη          warmth, heat
θερμὴ         adj.: warm
IEREIA               ἱέρεια         priestess
   ἱερεία         festival, sacrifice
IW                    ἴω               I come (pr.sub. (εἶμι)
  ἰὼ              exclamation: alas!
KONIS               κόνις           dust
     κονὶς          nit
NOMOS            νόμος           law
  νομὸς         pasture, district
OINOS              οἶνος            wine
     οἰνὸς          the ace of the dice
POTE                πότε            when?
   ποτὲ           ever
TIS                    τίς, τίνος, τίνι, τίνα  (inter. pronouns)
  τις, τινός, τινί, τινὰ        indef. pronouns
AISXYNW          αἰσχύνω       I shame out (pes. ind.)
αἰσχυνῶ     (fut. ind.)
KRINW              κρίνω            I judge (pres. ind.)
 κρινῶ         (fut. ind.)
MENW              μένω             I abide (pres. ind.)
μενῶ          (fut. ind.)
NEMW              νέμω             I divide (pres. ind.)
νεμῶ          (fut. ind.)

 I think this is an important reason to keep the accents in USE.

When I was ignorant, I also wrote without out accents or breathings
marks, up to the time
my non linear programming professor in mathematics, Carl Lemke,
introduced me to the mystic of Pythagoreans.
Others, who teach Greek, also do not use tones the way they exist in Greek.
This does not mean anything.
Tones (accents) are part of the Greek voice even if there are not
written in the text.

 According to Dionysus,
“Reading is the rendering of poetic or prose productions without
stumbling or hesitancy.  It must be done with due regard to
expression, prosody, and pauses.
Through the expression we learn the merit (ἀρετὴ arete) of the piece ;
from the prosody, the art of the reader
and from the pauses (διαστολῆς diastoles), the meaning intended to be conveyed.”
He goes on giving the specific characteristics of what reading should
be and then he concludes,
“Any reading done without due observance of these rules
degrades the merits of the poets
and makes the habits of readers ridiculous.”

Randal, thank for introducing me to Dionysius.

Nikolaos Adamou, the reader


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