Paul Derouda wrote:Thanks. I hate accents, or rather I hate myself for not having learnt them. Or rather I hate my first Greek textbook that told me to ignore them, a habit I've found difficult to unlearn.
Paul Derouda wrote:In my bookshelf there's a 1600+ page descriptive grammar of my mother tongue Finnish. Luckily, I didn't know it was that complicated when I learnt to speak as a baby. I mean all those rules are mostly intuitive, once you get into it. I'm sure it's the same with accents. If there were more quality audio recordings with the pitch accent, the accents would be a lot easier to memorize and understand, because you would have an audiotory cue.
I have the impression that beside editorial footprints, the accents carry a genuine legacy from the antiquity. I'm not exactly sure how on earth the were preserved from Homer's times to Byzantine times when they were finally systematically written down ...
Paul Derouda wrote:
Who says Finnish or Greek is difficult or illogical? It depends on your point of view. Take English. The writing system is essentially pictographic: ...
Scribo wrote:Well with English (being brought by the Angles, Jutes and Saxons) I believe a massive part of the loss of cases was redundancy, in that sentence structure became fixed and thus endings became irrelevant over time. It's been a while since I've studied this.
As for non native's taking over a language, there is something there about how substrate and adstrate influence is formed, sure, but we've sort of moved on from that sort of odd discourse of lesser speakers/races taking over a language and became more empirical. I mean look at modern Greek, it obviously has huge substrate influence from the Balkans and yet its fine. In English's case you have to deal with the fact that Celtic speakers possess a language arguably more complex, so...
Finnish is one hell of a language, I never really managed it, one of my class-mates was a Finn (though he swapped out of Classics and went into Philosophy, alas, post graduation) and I tried to learn some but woaw was it difficult. So pretty when sang though.
Scribo wrote:I'm still struggling exactly with how I see language simplification occurring....I can't help but feel the way we look at it is too....determined by our odd Victorian grammars and not enough by more modern findings. I don't know, I'll have to look into it more.
Grochojad wrote:Scribo wrote:I'm still struggling exactly with how I see language simplification occurring....I can't help but feel the way we look at it is too....determined by our odd Victorian grammars and not enough by more modern findings. I don't know, I'll have to look into it more.
Could you expand a little bit on that Scribo? A few sentences on what you mean by "Victorian grammars" and their approach, because you got me really interested.
Pierre Chantraine, Grammaire Homérique, tome 2, p. 22: "On a observé que le duel disparait à mesure qu'une société se développe intellectuellement." (It has been observed that the dual disappears as a society develops intellectually.)
It's astounding that one of the greatest Greek scholars of the 20th century was capable of such an idiotic statement in 1953.
Parataxis is the rule in the speech of children, primitive men, unlettered men and also of Homer.
Paul Derouda wrote:Pierre Chantraine, Grammaire Homérique, tome 2, p. 22: "On a observé que le duel disparait à mesure qu'une société se développe intellectuellement." (It has been observed that the dual disappears as a society develops intellectually.)
It's astounding that one of the greatest Greek scholars of the 20th century was capable of such an idiotic statement in 1953.
Scribo wrote:He didn't seem very nice, have you seen him lecturing the fat guy in Xenophon Memorabilia? 3.12 I think.
pster wrote:Another accent anomaly: ἱστάντες. One would expect a circumflex. Any thoughts about that Paul? I know you find these things interesting.
pster wrote:Another accent anomaly: ἱστάντες. One would expect a circumflex. Any thoughts about that Paul? I know you find these things interesting.
Grochojad wrote:pster wrote:Another accent anomaly: ἱστάντες. One would expect a circumflex. Any thoughts about that Paul? I know you find these things interesting.
Why would anyone expect circumflex?
NateD26 wrote:The participle has only long alpha in the nominative, and then only because ν was dropped before ς.
Paul Derouda wrote:NateD26 wrote:The participle has only long alpha in the nominative, and then only because ν was dropped before ς.
Why isn't the accent on the i then if sta is short?
NateD26 wrote:The participle has only long alpha in the nominative, and then only because ν was dropped before ς.
Paul Derouda wrote:Verbs have recessive accents, except some of the most common ones. So ἱστάντες, having the ultima short and the penultima long, should either have an acute accent on the antepenultima (*ἵσταντες) or a circumflex on the penultima (ἱστᾶντες). Circumflexes arise usually from contraction, when the first syllable originally had an acute (e.g. ἱστά-ασι -> ἱστᾶσι).
I can't explain this. Probably this exception is related to this being a very common verb.
NateD26 wrote:Paul Derouda wrote:NateD26 wrote:The participle has only long alpha in the nominative, and then only because ν was dropped before ς.
Why isn't the accent on the i then if sta is short?
Something to do with the stem being monosyllable (ἰ is the remnant of reduplication σι-).
The hour is late here. I'll have more tomorrow.
pster wrote:
Nate is probably on the right track. But if this is a monosyllable, what is in the aorist στάντες? A zero syllable??
NateD26 wrote:I only referred to στά and ignored the reduplication but that's not true in the present
as the iota is accented in the indicative.
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