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Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

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Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#21

Post by bloak »

yorwba wrote: post #16
bloak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both English and German, for example, have almost-homophones that children typically learn to distinguish by learning the spelling rather than by hearing the subtle difference in pronunciation? If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England…

> If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word? I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography. E.g. ta…

> I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography.

Represent the pronunciation accurately, or the children's pronunciation accurately?

It's a bit more interesting in English because a common mistake in English is to pronounce a word as it's spelt. For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent ... OK, that's me being prescriptive, but well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove.

I suppose parents and teachers have different incentives here: parents want their children to resemble them, make a good impression, and sound educated; teachers want the children in their care to get good marks in written tests and exams.

Knowing how to spell diarrhoea is less important nowadays in real life, because of computers. If you don't want to look stupid you still have to know it's guerrilla marketing rather than gorilla marketing, though. Computer will tell you how many Rs in guerrilla.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#22

Post by bregma »

evnix wrote: post #9
streamofdigits wrote: post #8

Is there a trend of written language simplifying over the ages? (Greek and Chinese examples come to mind). Is there an objective way to measure / rank script complexity? Assuming its true, is it correlated with more people becoming literate over time (hence simplifying the educational process)?

Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years but that is because of the very nature of the script. though I would agree, when it comes to Indian languages and their scripts, the symbols dont look any simpler but people tend not to use the entire set of consonant and vowel symbols available to them and only stick to using the simpler ones and likely the ones closer to English. a…

I would like to register my scepticism that Indian languages have not changed their pronunciation over multiple millennia.

My wife had a professor from India who spoke Hindi as a mother tongue. His wife, also from India, also had Hindi as a mother tongue but was from a different village. The couple spoke only English at home because it was the only language they had in common. You do not get that kind of mutually-unintelligible divergence unless the language has had changes in pronunciation, and profound ones at that.

It's quite possible that among a small subset of elites that languages have remained unchanged, but I think even that is highly unlikely. The Latin spoken by the educated elites of Europe at the time of the renaissance would have been unintelligble to someone on the streets of the eternal city during the republic. I suspect that such an assertion that the languages have remained unchanged for millennia is just simply not backed by facts.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#23

Post by Grustaf »

oytis wrote: post #4
idoubtit wrote: post #2

When I had to write Polytonic Greek, I had to write my own vim plugin that would transliterate on demand. For instance, while in insert mode h''als turns into ἃλς. It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us, but we should not forget that the words with different accents sounded differently, so it was probably not confusing to native speakers. Moreover, every language has its homopho…

> and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words Unaccented "o" and "a" are exact homophones, Russian children are trained in school to memorize the spelling in order to differentiate between the two.

Well, you can very often deduce which one it is from cognate words, or general language patterns, so it's not just rote learning.

e.g. this random headline from Pravda today:

"Байден намерен обсудить поведение России на встрече с Путиным"

NAMEREN - obviously a, since NA is a common prefix

OBSUDIT' - obviously o, since OB is a common prefix

POVEDENIE - obviously o, since PO is a common prefix

ROSSII - hopefully you can spell the name of your country...

or if you don't know how to spell OPRAVDAT' (justify) which has its stress on the ultimate syllable, you just need to recall the name of the glorious newspaper above, PRAVDA, where the stress is on the first A.

or GOROD is easy to spell because -oro- is a very common cluster.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#24

Post by Grustaf »

idoubtit wrote: post #2

When I had to write Polytonic Greek, I had to write my own vim plugin that would transliterate on demand. For instance, while in insert mode h''als turns into ἃλς. It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us, but we should not forget that the words with different accents sounded differently, so it was probably not confusing to native speakers. Moreover, every language has its homopho…

> It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us

I never laughed at this, it's not strange that there are words or word forms where the only difference is a single phonetic feature, or indeed where there is no difference at all. As you say that is the case in all languages.

And regarding accents in Greek, I don't recall encountering any case where the position of the accent was the crux. Which isn't really surprising given that the texts didn't have accents originally, so the writers couldn't rely on that alone.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#25

Post by thaumasiotes »

evnix wrote: post #9
streamofdigits wrote: post #8

Is there a trend of written language simplifying over the ages? (Greek and Chinese examples come to mind). Is there an objective way to measure / rank script complexity? Assuming its true, is it correlated with more people becoming literate over time (hence simplifying the educational process)?

Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years but that is because of the very nature of the script. though I would agree, when it comes to Indian languages and their scripts, the symbols dont look any simpler but people tend not to use the entire set of consonant and vowel symbols available to them and only stick to using the simpler ones and likely the ones closer to English. a…

> Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years

This is an ideological belief -- it is not even a theoretical possibility.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#26

Post by eloisius »

idoubtit wrote: post #2

When I had to write Polytonic Greek, I had to write my own vim plugin that would transliterate on demand. For instance, while in insert mode h''als turns into ἃλς. It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us, but we should not forget that the words with different accents sounded differently, so it was probably not confusing to native speakers. Moreover, every language has its homopho…

Even accounting for tonally differentiated words, Mandarin Chinese is rife with exact homophones. Shì can be “is,” “try,” “thing,” “kind/style” and many more. It amazes me how we are able to pattern match so well provided a little context.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#27

Post by thaumasiotes »

idoubtit wrote: post #19
streamofdigits wrote: post #8

Is there a trend of written language simplifying over the ages? (Greek and Chinese examples come to mind). Is there an objective way to measure / rank script complexity? Assuming its true, is it correlated with more people becoming literate over time (hence simplifying the educational process)?

The Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and the fact that it replaced the local writing and spread quickly suggests that a simpler technique of writing can win. I think the trend you see is the most common behavior. But the evolution of written languages is not a simple process. It is often influenced by political choice. E.g. Hangul for Korean, simplification laws in Germany or France. I can thi…

We can see a similar drift toward complexity in the written language by looking at text messaging in the modern day. The old system was that e.g. "before" was written "before". Now it might be written that way, or it might be written "b4". The second form is easier for the scribe, but requires a lot more knowledge on the part of the reader. The shorthand, which makes things difficult for the partially-educated (such as foreigners) is a result of mass literacy. If text messaging had been restricted to formal elite-to-elite communications, they would have gone on writing "before" the same way they'd been doing it all along.

I suspect something similar contributed to the trend you describe in Akkadian texts; with Akkadian in decline, the only people using it would probably have been more familiar with it than average. And that familiarity would let them use it in ways that wouldn't have made sense to a merchant's wife trying to send a letter to her husband abroad.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#28

Post by thaumasiotes »

AntigoneJournal wrote: post #3

Thanks for sharing this. Antigone runs open-access articles on anything to do with the Greeks, Romans and what the world has made of them since. We are committed to two things: opening up Classics to as wide an audience as possible, especially autodidacts who could not study the subject at school or college; and having no paywall, no paid susbcription and no profit motive. If you're interested to see what we've run i…

I have some questions!

(1) Rule #2 describes particles that do not have enough phonological weight to carry an accent of their own, so that they combine, for pronunciation purposes, with the word that follows them.

Rule #10 then describes particles that display the identical behavior, except that they combine with the preceding word instead of the following word.

To me, those would both be called "clitics", the term I know for a word which is phonologically dependent on another word while being grammatically independent. You name the second group as "enclitics" and have no name for the first group. Do you see them as being different phenomena? Why treat them so separately?

(Actually, #2 appears to include #10 in that it mentions "a word that has two accents at different places", while the only example of such a thing arises from rule #10.)

(2) I wanted to think of the accent location as being sensitive to morae rather than syllables. But the examples clearly show that while a long final syllable will drag an antepenultimate accent forward, a long penultimate syllable will not. Might you be able to talk about why that is?

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#29

Post by thaumasiotes »

gadders wrote: post #12

I work with a Greek lady, and tried to impress her with my Greek from Assassins Creed: Odyssey by saying "Chaire!" to her. Turns out it's archaic if not actually ancient Greek.

Sometimes I ask Chinese people about referring to midnight as 子时. (First (子) of the twelve double-hours (时) that traditionally make up a day.) They find this hilarious.

Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

#30

Post by thaumasiotes »

AntigoneJournal wrote: post #13
gadders wrote: post #12

I work with a Greek lady, and tried to impress her with my Greek from Assassins Creed: Odyssey by saying "Chaire!" to her. Turns out it's archaic if not actually ancient Greek.

Good on you: it is perfectly fine Ancient Greek!

What kinds of sources do we use to determine how classical people said hello? Surviving plays? Correspondence? Speeches recorded in historical works?
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