New Greek student finding trouble....
Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 3:59 am
Hello, everyone. I just joined this wonderful community today, and I've been taking advantage of the incredible useful resources posted on the site. Kudos for this; it's exactly what I've been looking for. Anyway, I consider myself a student of language, but other than a terrible first-year Latin class, a year of French and two years of Spanish, I don't have much formal training. So I find myself needing clarification on some of the stuff here that seems to be understood.
Why are there iota subscripts? I just don't understand this. If alpha-iota exist as a dipthong, what is the difference between alpha-iota and alpha-iota-subscript? I thought at first perhaps it distinguished long and short dipthongs (which are hard enough for me to imagine), but isn't that done by placing a macron over the iota which follows the alpha in alpha-iota? I couldn't find much information in the FGB about it... it barely mentions it.
Also, I don't think I'm brave enough to take on accents yet. I'm contemplating whether or not to get into that in this post, because I have no idea whatsoever what they even mean. It's like they took all my least favorite diacritical marks- the Latin macron and the French circumflex and grave, none of which I understand the meaning, and threw em in there. In fact, I don't even know for sure if the acute means the same thing in Greek as I'm thinking- i.e., the Spanish use, to denote stress. Is it going to kill me to forget about accents altogether until I have some further understanding? I was terrible with macrons in Latin; this stuff just terrifies me.
Thanks.
Edit: Oh, one other thing. I'm having trouble discriminating between the pronunciation of omicron and sigma, and the same with epsilon and eta. Any help?
Why are there iota subscripts? I just don't understand this. If alpha-iota exist as a dipthong, what is the difference between alpha-iota and alpha-iota-subscript? I thought at first perhaps it distinguished long and short dipthongs (which are hard enough for me to imagine), but isn't that done by placing a macron over the iota which follows the alpha in alpha-iota? I couldn't find much information in the FGB about it... it barely mentions it.
Also, I don't think I'm brave enough to take on accents yet. I'm contemplating whether or not to get into that in this post, because I have no idea whatsoever what they even mean. It's like they took all my least favorite diacritical marks- the Latin macron and the French circumflex and grave, none of which I understand the meaning, and threw em in there. In fact, I don't even know for sure if the acute means the same thing in Greek as I'm thinking- i.e., the Spanish use, to denote stress. Is it going to kill me to forget about accents altogether until I have some further understanding? I was terrible with macrons in Latin; this stuff just terrifies me.
Thanks.
Edit: Oh, one other thing. I'm having trouble discriminating between the pronunciation of omicron and sigma, and the same with epsilon and eta. Any help?