to/ bibli/on a)fi=ktai

[bingley]

[face=SPIonic]to/ bibli/on a)fi=ktai[/face]<br /><br />I'm so excited. I've just received Hansen & Quinn's Greek: An Intensive Course, the Greek equivalent of M&F. It looks great. If it's half as good as M&F it'll be something to treasure.

[Paul]

Hi Bingley,<br /><br />I'm slowly working my way through H&Q. For self-study I think it's the best Greek book I've seen.<br /><br />I am interested to hear what you think of it.<br /><br />Cordially,<br /><br />Paul

[bingley]

Somewhat bemused by the fact that they use a tilde but call it a circumflex. I can't always tell the difference between the tilde and the macron just by looking. Perhaps I just need new glasses.

[Keesa]

[quote author=bingley link=board=2;threadid=531;start=0#4793 date=1061703510]<br />Somewhat bemused by the fact that they use a tilde but call it a circumflex. I can't always tell the difference between the tilde and the macron just by looking. Perhaps I just need new glasses.<br />[/quote]<br /><br />Circumflex I am familiar with (thanks to French), but what is a tilde? <br /><br />Keesa

[bingley]

The thing that goes over the letter n in some Spanish words: ~

[mingshey]

I'm curious will they who use tilde for circumflex pronounce it with triple pitch, to say, rising-falling-and-rising-again? ;D<br />

[bingley]

Possibly, but I do not feel up to attempting such a feat of articulation. :-\ ;D

[Emma_85]

all my books use the tilde. any one here ever tried to pronounce greek the right way? with all the accents and such? i heard somewhere that they didn't just say the accents, but instead nearly sang them... bit confusing ???

[mingshey]

Ancient greek must have been quite musical indeed. They regarded the music very important and considered foreign languages(which was not musical) barbaric. Trying to pronounce the accents(and even the iota subscripts) properly(altho' it will be quite different from what the greeks really did) may at least help you to memorize the forms. Without this practice, i ususally am confused whether it was omicron or omega, accute or grave, or which syllable had the accent, etc.<br />

[bingley]

I am trying to use the accents as a pronunciation guide, in the H&Q. When I was doing Greek at school, we never took much notice of them, just mentioning that some words were enclitic. I think we were just supposed to somehow absorb the accents by osmosis.<br /><br />It must look very odd when I'm studying. To put them in, I tend to raise and drop my head and one hand to emphasise with the accents.

[chad]

hi emma, i've been working really hard to get the greek pitch (and length) pronunciation right. if you read devine and stephens 1994 book The prosody of Greek speech you'll see that there's so much more to do than just raise acutes a fifth, and have circumflexes as dropping on the melisma.<br /><br />I won't bore you with all the book's conclusions here, but e.g. acutes on lexical words cause following acutes in the same minor phrase to be slightly lower in pitch (unless the acute's on a proper name); a following grave however cancels that effect. graves themselves have a slight pitch accent, but not as high as word-initial unaccented syllables (which actually have a slight pitch accent on their own), and nowhere near as high as an actual acute. proclitics also have a slight accent, but differ depending on whether they come before nouns or verbs: if i remember (my notes are at home) pre-noun two-syllable proclitics plateau on the same pitch, while pre-verb proclitics rise slightly on the second syllable.<br /><br />all of these rules were worked out by analysing the musical notation to the delphic hymns and the few other ancient greek musical sources, and looking for statistically significant patterns (kind of the way greek grammatical rules were worked out). these statistical conclusions don't of course allow you to perfectly represent greek speech on a musical staff line, but they are pretty good for figuring out the relative pitch differences between two syllables in a minor phrase or poetic line/half line.<br /><br />i've started going through and representing the relative pitch, syllable by syllable, of the iliad, sappho, and i've just now started working out lysias' prose too (prose is much harder). i'm annotating each syllable with the 'rule' i'm using to determine its pitch (i've summarised devine and stephens into a little cheat sheet of its main rules). if you're interested i could post a link on the web. it's rough and tentative but i could use some help and advice if you're keen. there's also a (cut-down) summary of devine and stephens book on the net,<br /><br />http://arts.anu.edu.au/linguistics/People/AveryAndrews/Homer/pitch.htm<br /><br />which might be more helpful for figuring out what we can and can't know about greek pronunciation.<br /><br />cheers, chad. <br /><br />

[Emma_85]

i'm definatly interested chad! i know we'll be doing all that in greek when school starts again. but we're going to be reading the odyssey not the iliad. i'm not too sure yet into how much detail we will be going into... we've already gone through all the bits about why some accents are where they are and all that, but only in prose. but as my teachers can't even pronounce the theta...