[B-Greek] Accents in Ancient Greek
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Tue Sep 14 05:10:02 EDT 2010
>Hi, Randall,
>
>The reintroduction of the tone/pitch, on a very limited basis, to overcome late
homophones, strikes me as very cool. It's not consistent, but it
makes a whole
'lotta sense. It's one of the things I like about Modern Ancient
Greek, that it
is ALIVE, growing, evolving, being changed by the people who use it. >
Actually, this is something that I have observed in the language. The
reason that
modern Greeks insist on the correctly accented syllable is because it
distinguishes many otherwise homophons.
And what many may not be aware of is that 'higher tone' is one of the typical
marks of so-called 'stress'. A language with only two syllabic 'tones'
high and low
can be described as a 'stress' language. That is what I assume happened to
Greek in the post-Alexanderian period. With the loss of phonemically long
vowels (that is, where meaningful difference in relative time is used), the
multitone system became a high/low syllable system, that is, became a
'stress' system.
thus, the difference between TWN (always with high tone) and TON (never
with high tone unless introducing a toneless word) is a natural outcome
of analyzing the stress system.
And as mentioned and implied, throughout the history of Greek the
speakers have maintained a certain syllablic 'stress/hightone' as
necessary for clear communication. This was true during the KOINH
period and became even more critical after the HTA and Ypsilon
merged into the I-sound.
for P R,
you might try to get ahold of Geofrey Horrock's
Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers (Longman?, 1997).
He provides a reliable survey of what is known about the pronounciation of
Greek at various periods.
and back to Mark:
>that people who spoke Greek as a
second language--people like Jesus and Peter and John--probably did
not put the
stress on the syllable that the text books told them to.>
Actually, they would have put the accent on the syllable that they heard
being accented. They did not learn their Greek by using 'seminary textbooks'.
As they approached competent fluency they would have been accenting almost
everything correctly, even as second language users. POIEI would have been
accented on the second syllable [py-i'], OIKOS on the first [y'-kos], and
EIKOS 'probability' on the second [i-kos'], if accented at all, and it
would often
have had no accent/stress/hightone in fast speech where it was not focal.
If you want an idea of what Greek sounded like in Land of Israel in the first
century, you can read through the Dead Sea papyrii. The good spellers
won't tell you much, except that some people could copy texts correctly or
had had some training. It is the bad spellers that teach us some remarkable
things and there are plenty of examples repeated over and over in different
words even in that relatively small corpus of texts.
EI=I, AI=E, W=O, and OI=Y.
I would recommend such a phonology for any movie, of course.
ERRWSO
IWANHS.
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
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