Interesting. Would be cool to have audio clips for what it sounded like, especially with comparison to modern Greek (where possible)
Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
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Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#42Interesting. Would be cool to have audio clips for what it sounded like, especially with comparison to modern Greek (where possible)
This channel doesn't make the comparison and are short snippets from his full audiobooks, however its some of the best reconstructed ancient greek spoken by a specialist in this area
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kinds of sources do we use to determine how classical people said hello? Surviving plays? Correspondence? Speeches recorded in historical works?
Get W. Sidney Allen's slim text _Vox Graeca_. It goes over not only how Ancient Greek was pronounced but also how we know. The evidence includes explicit notes from grammarians and other writers, graffiti, borrowings, puns, and later forms of Greek. Allen also has another book _Vox Latina_ which does the same thing for Latin.
But I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get W. Sidney Allen's slim text _Vox Graeca_. It goes over not only how Ancient Greek was pronounced but also how we know. The evidence includes explicit notes from grammarians and other writers, graffiti, borrowings, puns, and later forms of Greek. Allen also has another book _Vox Latina_ which does the same thing for Latin.
But I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.
Hello,
A good source would be epistolography, another would be narration of encounters.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#45Thanks 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…
Thanks for these questions.
(1) The cases under rule #2 are a mixture of proclitics and common words (such as the two conjunctions and the adverb ou). Most proclitics (including most prepositions, and most forms of the definite article) in fact do keep their accent, so a general rule can't be given. Since enclitics do follow set rules, which are much more complex than simply not having an accent, they are given their proper treatment separately in the last (and most tricky) of the rules!
(2) Analysis by morae, whereby a short syllable counts as one mora, and a long syllable as two, generally allows the rule that an acute cannot go back more than four morae, and a circumflex more than three morae - but you still have to deal with the fact that, as you say, a final long restricts an acute to three morae from the end, and face the exception given in n.13. So we decided to avoid it entirely!
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.
Hello, A good source would be epistolography, another would be narration of encounters.
> A good source would be epistolography
This one seems tricky. English letters do not normally begin with "hello", or even with any synonymous phrase. Instead, they use forms that are specific to written letters.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A good question. The best, i.e. least likely to be unreliable, sources are: epistles as preserved by papyri; conversations as preserved in ancient drama (especially comedy); phrase-books that survive from ancient school curricula; funerary inscriptions that use everyday language; graffiti.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
My greek relatives would say eg. ‘heh-re-tiz-moose/chairetizmoos apo teen yaya soo’ (…trying to spell it there as it sounds, sort of…), meaning roughly: ‘(sending my) respects/greetings to your grandmother’, I’m wondering if it’s the same root? …If it is, I guess it could be interpreted as an extremely respectful way to say ‘hello’, or an archaic one I guess! :) …unless they were worried that your sleeve-dagger thing…
Same root, indeed. And yes it would be extremely respectful. No one would have an issue understanding what you mean though. As you mention words with the same root are very common ( the root is for joy) and also it is used in expressions from ecclesiastical texts that are adopted as part of the vernacular.
Thanks cgio! The history of languages is fascinating: how they evolve, adapt and borrow from/influence each other… You’ve sent me down a rabbit-hole now reading about Byzantine/Koine Greek:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Classical Greek, it isn't just the position of the accent that matters but the kind of accent there. You are right that the Greeks themselves did not need the accents notated, but students of Greek today often rely on the accent to tell e.g. the eta or eta+nu words apart.
Sure, I took 6 full-time terms of Classical Greek so I'm familiar with the different accents. But my Greek studies took place 20 years ago so I do wonder what you mean by eta and eta + nu words? Are these different subtypes of the third declension?
Eta alone can mean ‘the’, ‘she who’, ‘either/or’, ‘indeed’, ‘than’, or ‘I was’, with the accent helping to narrow it down. Eta+nu is ‘her who’, ‘he/she/it was’, etc.
Also, for example, tau+iota is either an interrogative or an indefinite pronoun, and it is the accent which tells you which without having to scan further through the sentence.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove. If you are going to teach the hoi polloi to write, and make an issue over spelling, this sort of thing seems predictable, though two centuries seems a long time for it to become noticable.
I love the term "the hoi polloi ." Yes, technically the English word the is redundant (because the Greek word hoi is also "the"). But the redundancy makes the term more-quickly understandable. From a UI/UX perspective — with the correct primary goal being not slavish brevity but service to the reader — here the redundancy is a good thing. (Cf. "ATM machine.")
Yeah, my pet theory is that English has naturally evolved to repeat the last word of acronyms to disambiguate them.