Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
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Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
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Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#2When 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 homophonies (the English "Dick" is not just a first name), and many near-homophonies for strangers (Japanese untrained ears can't distinguish "r" from "l", and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words).
A nitpick about the article: a paragraph about the other main diacritics would have given more context. The breathing marks chang the pronunciation as much as the accents did. And since Roman languages are not tonal languages, they kept the breathing as a "h" but dropped the tones.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#3Thanks for sharing this.
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Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#4When 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.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#5A philologist I know who likes teaching ancient languages actively just prefers to practice saying the words with rising (acut) or falling or rising and following (circumflex) pitch Yes, that does not explain why they are where they are, but ancient Greek has enough rules to memorize before you can read it! https://twitter.com/growe0/status/1401380230590132225
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#6When 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…
Many thanks for this. Yes, a fuller article would make mention of 'crasis' - where two successive words are melded into one utterance - which inevitably affected pitch and accentuation. As to breathings, their affect on pitch (as opposed to pronunciation) was null: the rough was a mere aspirate, and the 'smooth' was in effect the absence of any aspirate. Latin, as a fellow Indo-European language, had inherited initial aspirates, although these were fewer in number than in Greek, where rho and upsilon always had initial aspiration, and where Indo-European s- had become an aspirate (compare Lat. serpo with Gk herpo, or Lat. sal with your Greek hals.)
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#7I found a lot of interesting information here. A really good post, very thankful and hopeful that you will write many more posts like this one.
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Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#8Is 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)?
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
#9Is 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. another thing that I notice is that newer words don't have consonants followed by two or more consonants, the new words tend to look like stream of syllables with simple consonants followed by vowels.
Re: Ancient Greek accents in ten rules
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