Greek and Tones on the Diatonic Musical System

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WilliamThomson
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Greek and Tones on the Diatonic Musical System

Post by WilliamThomson »

I was wondering if anyone else has read the Intelligent Person's Guide to Greek (http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris ... ammar.html), despite it's title. I'm particularly focused on the statement that "Without question Greek had musical pitches on most words, with a range between a music third and fifth in our diatonic musical system." Is this accurate? If so, does anyone have good suggestions as to the best way to learn this? I'm looking into getting something like a lyre or some other simple manipulable string instrument so that I can match tones with it.... your thoughts?

-WT

cb
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Re: Greek and Tones on the Diatonic Musical System

Post by cb »

hi, about 10 yrs ago when i was young(ish) and (even more) foolish i went through all the evidence to try to do this myself and came up with this pitch model:

http://iliad.envy.nu/GreekPitchModel.pdf

here is how i came up with it applying to the beginning of the iliad (ignore the phonology, it's wrong, this was before I knew IPA and so was trying to find a simpler way to represent the sounds using what i knew then, it just shows how i saw the pitch working based on all the materials i read on grk pitch and i never updated it later for IPA):

http://iliad.envy.nu/iliad1-1-44.pdf

cheers, chad

WilliamThomson
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Re: Greek and Tones on the Diatonic Musical System

Post by WilliamThomson »

I have just downloaded these files and I will look over them in more detail later this week, but from a cursory glance I'm not sure I entirely understand the chart.... to what do the 1-7 refer to? and also [D&S]?

Regards,
WT

cb
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Re: Greek and Tones on the Diatonic Musical System

Post by cb »

hi, 1-7 refer to the different pitches, and D&S refers to Devine and Stephens 1994, The Prosody of Greek Speech, which is the best authority on how the pitch accent works.

you can see another summary of D&S' here:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~ada/AveryAndrews/Homer/

cheers, chad

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