[b-greek] Ignoring accents?

From: Randall Buth (ButhFam@compuserve.com)
Date: Wed Jan 30 2002 - 17:11:56 EST


CAIREIN

>
>I am convinced that our current accentuation system is not
>intended to have anything to do with pronunciation, and we would
>all be far better off ignoring it completely as a guide to
>pronunciation. Personally, I believe that anyone who develops
>any fluency in Koine Greek can only do so by ignoring the
>accents we have added, at least some of the time. I'll say
>more on the subject if anybody really wants me to,
>but I'll sign off for now.
>
>Michael Haggett

Personally, working with the stress accents that resulted from the loss
of length in the post-Alexandrian period, I find the accents easy and a
reasonable point of crystalization.
 Of course, some play and adaptation takes place in real language use.
Same thing happens in Hebrew. and Arabic.
Writing systems never get things perfect.

E.g. Greek enclitics often cause an extra acute to be added to the last
syllable of the preceding word. O ANQRWPOS ESTIN WDE. Which
syllable should have the primary accent? I would recommend--Keep the
original "AN-" and ignore the "-POS": Even so, "POS" will easily develop a
secondary stress, which 'comes for free', without trying.

More difficult questions involve BARUS TONOS (grave). It is possible
that these involved 'no accent', so that several words were chained along
into one long phonetic word group. Well, a person has to be very very
fluent
before such a way of reading becomes helpful. And one is oblivious to
any kind of 'monitoring' the system at that stage. I can't/wouldn't think
about
Hebrew or Arabic accent patterns when speaking at normal speeds.

As with most langauges, when one is speaking at less than top speed there
is both time and an expectation to get the full form out, in this case
(Greek)
 a word with a full accent (acute).

blessings,

Randall Buth

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