pster wrote:This has bugged me for a long time. Does anybody have a way of thinking about this? My problem is more with the ει. If it were a diphthong, none of this would bother me. But it is a monophthong.
Scribo wrote:Ok, I won't vote here because I pronounce it /i/.I'm lame like that. Basically though it's going to be, depending on period, one of those differences that native speakers would have understood but us not so much, it often happens with foreign languages.
The thinking on this varied btw, its somewhat obvious that throughout the classical period these were very much distinct though later both sounds would collapse. Essentially ei and h would be similarish, with the later being more naturally more open and wider. You have to produce a very similar sound using different parts of your mouth.
daivid wrote:pster wrote:This has bugged me for a long time. Does anybody have a way of thinking about this? My problem is more with the ει. If it were a diphthong, none of this would bother me. But it is a monophthong.
Clearly there are several pronunciation schemes around. Taylor teaches ει to be a diphthong. For me keeping ε and η distinct is far harder.
Paul Derouda wrote:Brel is pedagogical but please note that if you speak like that in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might be considered a snob and end up with a nosebleed or worse...It's not uncommon for French teachers, some politicians etc. to speak like that on occasion though. You might want to check out Georges Brassens too...
Another thing about ει is that in early Greek like Homer it's really two different sounds, sometimes a diphthong and sometimes a long monophthong and you never know when because the spelling reflects Attic pronunciation. And it's the same thing with ου.
NateD26 wrote:Really, though, who cares how anyone pronounce or should pronounce these sounds?
What bothers me is that I don't have two distinct sounds ready to hand.
Paul Derouda wrote:When I started Greek, I pronounced η basically as a long variant of ε and ει as diphtong. I still might do so, but I try to make ει just a long /e/ sound and η another long e sound.
I think the analogy with French is a good starting point, but French has two e sounds.Très, même, mais are open sounds like η and nez is a closed sound like ει - only make those sounds longer than the French ones. But then the problem is that these two sounds are nearly complementary in distribution and are nowadays almost not phonemically distinct anymore in "standard" French. So although I speak fluent French, I have difficulty distinguishing the difference between those two sounds. When you listen to some old songs in French or other old stuff, they often make a better distinction than you'll now hear in the street nowadays. (Just hear how Jacques Brel pronounces même! (0:53))
So French has both "ει" and "η" but isn't much help for me. So what I do is that I exaggerete the openness of η and pronounce it almost like Finnish /ä/ - which is much like English man. Maybe that's too much, but this makes it clearly a distinct phoneme, so I don't have to be so careful to keep my ει closed enough.
Nobody has to listen to my Greek though, I pronounce Greek only to myself...
Scribo wrote:Seriously, thank you, I've been looking for songs etc in French to listen to and improve my accent and that looks amazing. I can get around whenever I'm in French but I'm never 100% happy with my accent since I've never had a chance to work on it. Now, I do, and this stuff comes along. Awesome.
pster wrote:I'm not sure what part of his pronunciation of même you are referring to. Pronouncing the second "e" is standard in classical French poetry/drama as long as it is within the line and not followed by a vowel. One hears the extra syllable a lot in French singing down to today. Cue 2:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wXcvx4EYG4
I suppose the "ê" is different from what we hear today, but it's not clear how much of that is due to time passing and how much of it is due to particularities of that sung performance.
Paul Derouda wrote:Yes, Brel's ê is particularly open to my ear. Maybe that doesn't mean anything. Maybe I'm just voicing my own uncertainty about French e and ɛ like you're voicing yours about Greek ει and η. Anyway, I think the problems are analogous.
Paul Derouda wrote:As far as I know, difference between vowel quantity is never phonemical in French.
Paul Derouda wrote:Btw, Markos' suggestion sounded pretty good to me.
Paul Derouda wrote:My dictionary says gives il [il] and île [il], même [mɛm] and très [trɛ]. I would usually pronounce all these vowels short. I could also pronounce all of these long in some contexts, probably even il, I can't say exactly when but I think it has to do with emphasis or clause position or something.
I had another look at the Wikipedia article: "With the exception of the distinction made by some speakers between /ɛ/ and /ɛː/ in rare minimal pairs like mettre [mɛtʁ] ('to put') vs. maître [mɛːtʁ] ('teacher'), variation in vowel length is entirely allophonic." So maybe that's part of what surprises me about Brel's ê, though I still suspect his ɛ is more open than mine...
So if your sources say [mɛ:m], maybe that reflects "some speakers's" way of speaking which some other people consider standard.
Argh, I don't know, haven't ever properly studied this stuff except by speaking.
Markos' suggestion is an ok approximation in my opinion if we don't seem to be able to nail down [ɛ:] and [e:] properly with our linguistic backgrounds.
pster wrote:
It seems like your dictionary doesn't use the colon at all. Am I right about that? The online French dictionary I use is like that. My understanding is that the phonetic alphabet rarely fully deployed and what one gets is some simplification depending on who the audience is. I love precision and tradition, but if my dictionary used the full alphabet, I'd change my ways.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... t_2005.png
daivid wrote:It seems to me that the pronunciation that you need to use depends on how you intend to use Greek.
If you just intend to read and write, as long as each grapheme is distinct it doesn't matter how you pronounce them. To be able to convert the letters into some sound in your head is an important part of learning a word . ie phonemes suffice.
If you want to upload videos to youtube then you have to conform to other peoples expectations
(even when those expectations are wrong).
I don't really get poetry but that I imagine is the one area where it is important to be able to get the exact sound of the poet would have spoken.
Paul Derouda wrote:pster wrote:
It seems like your dictionary doesn't use the colon at all. Am I right about that? The online French dictionary I use is like that. My understanding is that the phonetic alphabet rarely fully deployed and what one gets is some simplification depending on who the audience is. I love precision and tradition, but if my dictionary used the full alphabet, I'd change my ways.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... t_2005.png
I checked Petit Robert too, which I think is the best French monolingual dictionary. They don't seem to distinguish different quantities of ɛ and they explicitly call mettre and maître homonyms. Check their introduction under "Evolution du système vocalique".
I just checked my Langenscheidt--sad day when you have to go to Germans to learn how to pronounce French!--and they indicate ɛ: for même but ɛ for très.
Σαῦλος: I "grew up" speaking a German tradition Erasmian.
ει was pronounced as "why" and so we didn't distinguish between αι and ει.
ει is pronounced like "we" and so is iota. αι and ε are pronounced as ̈́"pet."
Markos wrote: This is the way I speak English and this is the way the ESL teacher for whom I volunteer from time to time speaks English. But the funny thing is that the students, Mexicans and Iranians and Thais and Tibetan exiles who grew up in India, do NOT pronounce the English vowels this way. They actually distinguish between the vowels BETTER than we do. (the kitchen-> thee keetchen instead of thuh kitchuhn.) We never even bother to tell the students about this and no one notices and no one gives a crap because they are focused on learning the language. All of this makes as much, or as little, sense as anything.
Scribo wrote:daivid wrote:It seems to me that the pronunciation that you need to use depends on how you intend to use Greek.
If you just intend to read and write, as long as each grapheme is distinct it doesn't matter how you pronounce them. To be able to convert the letters into some sound in your head is an important part of learning a word . ie phonemes suffice.
If you want to upload videos to youtube then you have to conform to other peoples expectations
(even when those expectations are wrong).
Which is one of the reasons why I honestly can not be bothered. See, if it was someone who has actually spent some time on the topic criticism would be interesting. If someone has an aeshetic reason, I actually find that interesting too. However, when you get these idiots who haven't even seen a book on linguistics commenting with the surety a panel of experts would not dare have on any subject it annoys me. Look over some of the good videos on YT to see the comments I mean "you bro beta is vita, c is actually che" and so on. .
IreneY wrote:Where's the "No, and I don't see the reason to do so" option in the poll?
IreneY wrote:Where's the "No, and I don't see the reason to do so" option in the poll?
I hadn't thought of that, but some others here seem sympathetic to that way of thinking. That leads one to ask if there is a really a reason to distinguish any vowels at all. Indeed, it seems we really could just make them all schwas! Think of how much simpler everything would be!
menen eede thee Peleeedee Echelees
eeleemenen, e mere Echeeees elge etheke
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