51–54 of 54 posts
https://www.targetpayandbenefits.review/Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well sure, there are minimal pairs, but most of the time it’s immediately clear from the context, and we have to keep in mind that the accents were added much later by modern philologists, so they have de facto been deduced from the context.
But sure, there goldilocks zone where it’s not obvious to the lay reader, but the scholars are pretty certain what it should say, and then it helps. I wouldn’t say it’s a major struggle when reading Greek though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 o…
That's funny... I always considered (and pronounced) the t in often as a (or something close to a) thorn. To me, the sound is in between official and oven.