Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

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Nathanial
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Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Nathanial »

Listening to audio is, as I understand it, one of the most efficient means of learning a language. But unfortunately, there is a serious lack of Ancient Greek audio available. Ionnis Stratakis of Podium-Arts has provided some great material but to me the cost is unreasonable when compared to other audiobooks. Many albums, operas, dramas and audiobooks can be found on DVD or CD for less than £10 per hour audio; a fraction of the cost of the current available audio files.

So, what I am suggesting is that a kickstarter is created so that Mr Stratakis can be encouraged to produce the whole Iliad and Odyssey, before progressing to other works. The details can be fleshed out later. One this is completed, I am sure someone somewhere is capable of recording further works of Ancient Greek, particularly Plato`s dialogues.

p.s. This is Ionnis Stratakis` best shot at immortality. Don`t delay!

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by akalovid »

I wholeheartedly support Mr Stratakis. We should supply a link to show people what we are talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvVWiDsPWQ -starts a t0:51

One reason why it’s so important to support him is that he sounds good to the Greek ear as well. As a native speaker of Modern Greek I have known for some time about the inadequacies of Modern Greek pronounciation when it comes to Homer. But many other renditions sounded just stilted to me. He is magnificent!

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Timothée »

Stratakis is exquisite. There are many other Textkit members, as well, who are quite fond of his readings. I first found him when it chanced that I saw and listened to his Hippocratic Oath video on Youtube. Splendid.

I think the biggest problem for many who reconstruct and record Ancient Greek (and Latin) is that they concentrate so much on the pronunciation that they forget to think what the text they are reading actually means. In other words the command of these languages (Greek, Latin) should be such—or at the very least the text should be that familiar—that they know at all times what the text is saying. Doing this they automatically add appropriate intonation and other suprasegmentals, which paces the text in a natural way. (Whether this is actually how the ancients uttered their language cannot be known and is in fact irrelevant.)

However, I’m quite suspicious of what relevancy the fact that he sounds good to native Modern Greek ears bears. I don’t think this is of any especial importance, and is mostly due to the fact that he’s a Greek. This thought must be based on some romantic ideas that modern languages (such as Modern Irish, Italian, and Greek) have a faint echo of the ancient ancestral language from across millennia within them.

I admit being guilty of this thought myself, and doubt that it is perilous as long as one is aware of this oneself. Modern Greek is obviously a descendant of the Ancient Greek, but the development has been immense. Moreover, what can deceive listeners is that native Modern Greek speaker won’t have have French/German/English/Italian etc. accent in their pronunciation. They will have Modern Greek accent, and this is why it sounds good to Modern Greeks.

But Stratakis is excellent also to non-Greek ears.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by akalovid »

Ok. Perhaps I should not answer this and thereby incur the wrath of my compatriots.

PERSONAL OPINION ALERT
The reason why I PERSONALLY find it very important to appeal to Greek ears, is that the Greek dislike of most other accents (along with practical and political reasons at the time of official introduction of δημοτική, which have now become less important) has led us Greeks to use modern accent in school. This I PERSONALLY would like to see change because the way I was taught in school completely destroys the meter.

Of course there are some texts where this is not so much of a pity.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by katzenjammer »

Sorry to resurrect such an old thread, but I just discovered Stratakis and - after years of Daitz - I really enjoy listening to him, and would love to have more of the Odyssey from him; and would indeed contribute to a Kickstarter towards that end.

Not sure if this went anywhere?

I suppose I'm chiming in to see if it did? :)

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by hellenist »

Timothée wrote: Thu Feb 15, 2018 10:29 pm However, I’m quite suspicious of what relevancy the fact that he sounds good to native Modern Greek ears bears. I don’t think this is of any especial importance, and is mostly due to the fact that he’s a Greek. This thought must be based on some romantic ideas that modern languages (such as Modern Irish, Italian, and Greek) have a faint echo of the ancient ancestral language from across millennia within them.

I admit being guilty of this thought myself, and doubt that it is perilous as long as one is aware of this oneself. Modern Greek is obviously a descendant of the Ancient Greek, but the development has been immense. Moreover, what can deceive listeners is that native Modern Greek speaker won’t have have French/German/English/Italian etc. accent in their pronunciation. They will have Modern Greek accent, and this is why it sounds good to Modern Greeks.

But Stratakis is excellent also to non-Greek ears.
IMHO, and in order to offer a bit more detail drawing from what my current own perception is on the relevance and development aspect:

1) the contemporary native Greek pronounciation (aka 'Modern') has not been as such during, say, the last few centuries, but at least since the 4th century AD (with the exception of 'υ' / upsilon which continued to be pronounced as /ü/ up until roughly the 10th century), and a large number of sound changes had already been established between 1st century BC to AD, with the changes starting as soon as the 4th century B.C., (or even before that in the case of the Boetian dialect which is noteworthy in exhibiting how the phonetics of the language would change in the future).

2) The relation between Latin and the Romance languages (especially Italian and Spanish being the closest) is not the same as the relationship between Modern Greek and Ancient Greek. In the first case the Romance languages are closely related but different languages that evolved out of Latin (via way of the medieval Vulgata/Ecclesiastical Latin), yet in the latter case the contemporary Modern Greek is an evolution within the boundaries of the same overal language -i.e. a temporal dialect straight from the Koine, with the exception of Tsakonian-. E.g. a non-specialist modern Greek reader can understand Koine/Bible Greek up to a reasonably acceptable level, and a noticeable big drop occurs once one moves backwards to Attic and especially Homeric, where recognition is limited at best to short phrases and at worst to isolated words.

Arguably, the reason for Greek having been so conservative throughout time is threefold, a) historically, an attempt to preserve and/or emulate parts of the classical Attic language out of an admiration for the particular era, i.e. the atticist camp b) the religious aspect, Koine, i.e. the religious camp -but not limited to that, Koine has a titanic corpus counting in BC hellenistic texts, AD neoplatonic and medical, and later Eastern Roman), c) the Eastern Roman empire aka Byzantium with it's version of later Koine, continuing to exist up to the mid 15th century as a stable point of reference/authority for the language and as such keeping at bay any lingustical split forces from developing. In the interim period between the 15th century (dissolution of the Greek speaking states in Constantinople, Morea, Trebizond) and 19th century (emergence of the modern Greek state), you have a version of Rhomaic -late Byz.- slowly evolving to modern Demotic Greek, followed by the clash between Katharevousa and Demotic in the early 19th to late 20th century (largely a re-emergence of the old Atticist vs Koine clash) and ending into today's Standard Modern Greek (a blend of primarily demotic and bits of katharevousa).

3) In terms of historical and comparative linguistics, a knowledge of Modern Greek -inc. phonological changes-, as well as Italian and Spanish, is very helpful in regards to Greek and Latin respectively, as it offers a -reverse engineering- avenue in examining how certain words have evolved or remained, how the sounds have changed or remained and why, and lead to inferences that would not be as easy or even possible by examination of the past alone. In other words, I'd think that it is not a romantic notion at all to consider that the descendant dialects/languages of Greek and Latin do contain traces of the ancient languages, but rather a very pragmatic one. E.g. it's like examining the ancient remains of a building -maybe one that during the passage of time has had newer layers built on top of it-, in the modern era, and trying to understand how it might have looked like during the antiquity by using what materials and clues you have available in the present.

4) Bearing in mind the above, I too am wondering myself why Stratakis sounds so good, I was mesmerised when I first came across his partial rendition of the Odyssey on YouTube, as opposed to, say, Daitz who although he seems to be following all the metrical rules in the book, can at times sound rather whimsical, at least to most modern ears, Greek or not. I'd think that Stratakis is universally pleasing as, apart from skilfully using a reconstructed ancient Greek pronounciation, his otherwise vocalic attributes being derived from -modern- Greek, it's at least the closest you can get to a Greek accent in and of itself from what is available, again, while taking into perspective all of the above.

As for an Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter, emphatically yes please! It would be wonderful for this to happen.
Last edited by hellenist on Thu Jul 21, 2022 6:02 am, edited 3 times in total.
Γηράσκω δ' ἀεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by bcrowell »

Stratakis's speed is by far the slowest of any recording I've ever heard. He's doing 35 feet per minute. The recordings that I've thought were pleasurable to listen to were about 70-80. There's no way I would listen to this for more than a few lines.

If I was going to listen to a recording in restored pronunciation, I would use Julius Tomin's: http://www.juliustomin.org/iliadbook1.html It's very expressive and clear, but it also moves along at a decent pace. It's free, and he's got the Iliad done through book 15.
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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by jeidsath »

Stratakis is extremely pleasing to listen too...but I can't clap the ictus to his reading (or to Daitz, or to Tomlin). It doesn't feel like hexameter, and they only get close for very short snatches within the line.

See any of the Kalevala performances here (trochaic tetrameter) and you'll be able to clap the downbeat after about 5 seconds of listening. The instrument helps, but isn't necessary.

Do they pronounce their Finnish perfectly, or with a weird accent, or with a lisp? Are their vowels entirely modern? We'd have to ask a Finn. It doesn't matter at all. All of us can hear the meter.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by hellenist »

jeidsath wrote: Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:04 pm Do they pronounce their Finnish perfectly, or with a weird accent, or with a lisp? Are their vowels entirely modern? We'd have to ask a Finn. It doesn't matter at all. All of us can hear the meter.
I think that for a 19th century poem -drawing from much older traditions- such as the Kalevala, it doesn't matter how much how this 21st century rendering is being pronounced as long as the meter is clear, but given enough time and hearing this in a theoretical 2500 years from now it could matter a lot indeed.
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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by jeidsath »

If they don't get the most important, fundamental, checkable, thing right, it's a sign about the plausibility of the rest of the reconstruction. They are doing better, at least, than classicists who "make meter" by emphasizing the ictus simply through extending short vowels into long wherever they see a double consonant, or wherever the position is right, transforming any string of random syllables into "hexameter" with fudge.

Also, I strongly suspect that the only way to achieve the correct vowel length and pitch separation of the early language, is to get good at this. Tomlin's Plato, for example, is very enjoyable until you get to every third sentence, where he has made another ό into an ώ, or similar.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by ariphron »

bcrowell wrote: Thu Jul 21, 2022 10:26 pm Stratakis's speed is by far the slowest of any recording I've ever heard. He's doing 35 feet per minute. The recordings that I've thought were pleasurable to listen to were about 70-80. There's no way I would listen to this for more than a few lines.
The absolute speed of the recording really doesn't matter. If you find his recordings too slow, listen to them at a speedup that makes you comfortable. Modern algorithms pull that off with quite modest distortion of the sound.

There is no single good speed for recordings. Students of a language should listen at a speed at which they can hear the distinct sounds of the language, and get the gist of the story from what they hear. In a class, a teacher can read a passage at a speed appropriate to the students, but a recording is a resource for listeners at a wide range of levels. Since Stratakis consistently follows prosodic distinctions that have no parallels in the modern languages he speaks, he has no choice but to record at such a speed that he himself can hear what he's doing, which is likely slower than for people who simply follow modern phonology.

If you can follow an unfamiliar portion of the Iliad by just listening to a recording at 12 lines per minute or faster, then your Greek is amazing, and much better than most of us who are interested in downloading audiobooks in Ancient Greek.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by bcrowell »

ariphron wrote: Sat Jul 30, 2022 4:22 pm The absolute speed of the recording really doesn't matter. If you find his recordings too slow, listen to them at a speedup that makes you comfortable. Modern algorithms pull that off with quite modest distortion of the sound.
Yes, that's a good point. However, if the point is to try to reconstruct something like the ancient aesthetic effect, then I doubt that this will really work. If I recite Shakespeare at 1/4 of a normal speaking tempo, then speed it back up by 4x, it's not going to sound like an artistic enactment of Shakespeare, it's going to sound bizarre. Whatever algorithm youtube uses is amazingly good, but it's not *that* good.
ariphron wrote: Sat Jul 30, 2022 4:22 pm If you can follow an unfamiliar portion of the Iliad by just listening to a recording at 12 lines per minute or faster, then your Greek is amazing, and much better than most of us who are interested in downloading audiobooks in Ancient Greek.
No, I wouldn't be able to understand a passage by Homer at *any* speed just by listening, unless I had already prepared by thoroughly studying it. My speed of comprehension is probably 0.5 lines per minute.

After talking through all of these considerations, it sounds to me like there are many different combinations and permutations of what people could wish for in this type of recording. So if there is a market for it, the already extremely small audience is going to be further fragmented according to what individuals want. Reconstructed or Erasmian pronunciation? Fast? Slow? Tonal accents? Stress accents?
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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Vasile Stancu »

I am trying to imagine a scene where the bard arrives in an ancient Greek city and begins „homerizing” in the central market the great acts of the heroes of the Trojan War. Would the audience expect those stories to have a clear rhythm to be clappable, at the expense of distorting most of the natural accents, or would they prefer to understand in real time the meaning of what they hear? I suspect that even today, the most knowledgeable of classical scholars would have problems of understanding while hearing the Iliad recited with rigorous hexameter rules (as defined today), supposing he has not been accustomed to those rules. Anyway, I cannot imagine that the homeric poems were intended to be heard by Greek scholars exclusively, or by a tiny segment of an audience fragmented by individual philological preferences; I believe that the poet’s goal must have been to gather people together around him rather than scatter them away.

Edit: I have prepared the text of Iliad A like this https://vasilestancu.ro/lectii-homeric_ ... etric.html and intend to add it to my Romanian translation of Clyde Pharr’s manual. I have tried to make it as easy to read as possible: the syllables are not divided, the feet are marked with yellow alternatively, and the long syllables are bold; short syllables are not marked in any way. My intention is to try to figure out a way of reciting Homer observing the hexameter as well as the written accents of words. Does anybody have any experience in this sense?

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by jeidsath »

In his elements of rhythm, Aristoxenus explicitly describes the time intervals carried by melody and voice and bodily signals (ie., you could clap to it) as being carried in the text by feet broken up into arsis and thesis, according to syllable duration. He goes on about this at great length. Nothing analogous to the accent that we write upon Greek words nowadays, pitch or stress, gets a peep from him.

Besides that, the ancient Greek poetry (strikingly unlike post-Justinian Greek poetry) is written entirely with concern only for these light and heavy syllables, and with no concern whatsoever for any other kind of accent until Babrius in the 2nd century AD.

If we can't imagine this working with some particular understanding of the Greek accent...I suggest that it's the understanding of that accent and its expression in Homeric poetry that may be at fault. People could understand what Homer was saying when recited. They did enjoy listening to the Homeric poems. And the poetic rhythm was entirely contained in the arsis and thesis of heavy and light syllables, not the modern stress accent nor even the ancient pitch analogue to it.

Here are a couple of lines of Homer from memory, which I saw the other day:

αμφι δε τειχος ελασσε πολει και εδειματο ϝοικους
και νηους ποιησε θεων και εδασσατ αρουρας

Why did I write them without accent? Because the the accent, being unrelated to the meter, didn't stick in my head (though I suspect that I could graphically add it for all these words without error). What did stick was the:

αμφι δε τειχος ελασσε πολει και εδειματο ϝοικους
και νηους ποιησε θεων και εδασσατ αρουρας

And it only stuck because I read it and repeat it aloud now with emphasis on that bolded ictus. (If I don't add that ϝ, it would similarly flee my memory.)
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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Vasile Stancu »

Thanks, Joel. I would like to read Aristoxenus' work on this matter; could you recommend some source in this respect. I am now in the position of one who started recently to study Homer and I am puzzled by the various tendencies manifested in relation with recitation. As I practiced some reading in accordance with the hexameter rules, I noticed that it becomes quite easy after relatively short time, but also somewhat addictive, i.e. I tend to read other texts the same way. My desire is to find a good way to read Homer's poems, without fearing that after a good while I need to turn to another system.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by jeidsath »

Someone, somewhere, mentioned that Aristoxenus talked about upbeats and downbeats, so I looked up his "elements of rhythm" on TLG and skimmed the bits that seemed interesting. Volume 2 seems complete, but volume one only exists (on TLG) as a few fragmentary quotations.

I had also looked for the Greek text with apparatus as a pdf on Hathi, but gave up after a bit. If you have a library, it looks like TLG gets the text from "G.B. Pighi, Aristoxeni rhythmica, Bologna: Patron, 1959."

This is the bit where he talks about signaling time intervals with the body (really he's discussing that existence of a smallest interval of time that can't accept more than one signal of a given type). Elsewhere he goes into arsis and thesis.

...λέγω δὲ τῶν οὕτω κινουμένων, ὡς ἥ τε φωνὴ κινεῖται λέγουσά τε καὶ μελῳδοῦσα καὶ τὸ (σῶμα) σῆμα σημαῖνόν τε καὶ ὀρχούμενον καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς τῶν τοιούτων κινήσεων κινούμενον. Τούτων δὲ οὕτως ἔχειν φαινομένων, δῆλον ὅτι ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστιν εἶναί τινας ἐλαχίστους χρόνους, ἐν οἷς ὁ μελῳδῶν θήσει τῶν φθόγγων ἕκαστον. Ὁ αὐτὸς δὲ λόγος καὶ περὶ τῶν ξυλλαβῶν δῆλον ὅτι καὶ περὶ τῶν σημείων. Ἐν ᾧ δὴ χρόνῳ μήτε δύο φθόγγοι δύνανται τεθῆναι κατὰ μηδένα τρόπον, μήτε δύο ξυλλαβαί, μήτε δύο σημεῖα, τοῦτον πρῶτον ἐροῦμεν χρόνον. Ὃν δὲ τρόπον λήψεται τοῦτον ἡ αἴσθησις, φανερὸν ἔσται ἐπὶ τῶν ποδικῶν σχημάτων.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Vasile Stancu »

I could not find this edition of the book; instead, I found this dissertation on Aristoxenus' work: https://www.academia.edu/es/11796499/AR ... _POXY_2687.

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Re: Iliad and Odyssey Kickstarter by Ioannis Stratakis

Post by Vasile Stancu »

I noticed that William Annis, in his "Reciting the Heroic Hexameter" (http://aoidoi.org/articles/), rigorously observes the written accents in his MP3 samples. Could you please comment on that.

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