I thought that it would be useful to have an audio practice thread. The idea is to get practice listening to other people’s audio, to record multiple versions of the same texts, comment, critique, etc.
Here’s something very short. A pun in Xenophon?
Extra points if you make your recording (or a transcript) based on my recording without looking up the text. Note that any errors in that case will be my fault.
Also, please suggest a text for round two.
Okay, I think for the idea you have to work, it would make sense not to look anything up, certainly not to look at the text from the which the audio is made. To that extent, it would make more sense to make up a passage so that people cannot cheat.
That said, I did not look this up. (I have read the Anabasis a few times but I don’t remember this passage.) Remember that I am basically an Erasmian, although I have also listened to and spoken Buthian and Modern Greek; the restored Attic is what I find by far the hardest; I have had the least experience with it.
Without looking up anything in a dictionary and only by listening to it a bunch of times, this is what I hear:
πολλακίς ( I don’t know why this would not be πολλάκις) δ’ ἦν ἰδεῖν παρὰ τὰς στειβωμενας (I’m either not hearing this right or I don’t recognize the word, maybe στειβόω, something to do with “narrow”) ὁδοὺς καὶ ποδῶν καὶ χειρῶν καἰ ὀφθαλμῶν στερομενοὺς (I again, knowing nothing about meter, I don’t know why Restored Attic speakers change the stress on syllables; I would expect στερομένους. This is one of the reasons why the Restored Prophora is the hardest to understand.) ανθρώπους.
The meaning is something like “And often it was possible to see, along the narrow? paths, men deprived of legs and arms and eyes.”
Here’s my audio of your passage
https://archive.org/details/TextkitAudioThread1
And for round 2 I made up a passage. I wanted it to be easier than yours. maybe this is too easy.
https://archive.org/details/TextkitAudioThread2
And now I am going to look up your passage in the Anabasis and see what I missed. After I look at the original, I will tell you if I see a pun.
I will get too your passage shortly, but for me, I have trouble with pitch accent because I’m plain not very good at it. I am neither very musical, nor am I the sort of person who can do fake accents for comedy. But here is a try 2 with better accents, I hope.
EDIT: I still don’t have my computer. So while I’ve listened to all of your audio, I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to type up a transcription.
hi, could some techie person please explain how to upload audio online easily? i could record a few lines of the iliad and prose say to show how i hear it. i have a mac air but have never used the recording function if there is one - if someone could please explain what app to use to record, what audio format is best for online and then where to upload files online for free, i’ll have a go sometime, thanks!
I’m no techie, and I am unfamiliar with mac, but I’m sure you have a sound recorder on your computer. I guess the best place to upload is still archive.org
because it’s fast to upload and you don’t have to join anything to hear the audios and they are easy to download from the site.
But Σαῦλος (Paul Nitz) and I also experimented with Voice Thread
https://voicethread.com/myvoice/#
which is even faster to upload, as you can post directly to the cloud without saving anything on your hard drive first. But I think you have to join this first to hear the audios, which not every one is going to want to do. Youtube is also fine, and it is easier to understand spoken Ancient Greek if you can see somebody’s face while they are speaking.
I use audacity for recording mp3s on my Mac. I have an app on my phone called Voice Recorder that works very well, and will upload directly to YouTube.
Here’s my version of Xen. An. 1.9.13.
I downloaded a iPhone app called Voice Recorder, but I wasn’t able to download directly to Youtube. Maybe it’s not the same program. Anyway, Youtube requires you to add an image to the sound, and that takes a lot of time. I’d like to find a really easy way to upload the files.
Well, anyway, I think this is a nice exercise, but I do know if I’m going to continue for long, because it’s really time consuming. I have to repeat a short sentence like this 20 or 30 times before I’m even remotely satisfied, and then recording the file, converting it and uploading all take their time.
Oops, I noticed that in a fit of early onset dementia I pronounced plural feminine accusative -ας short. Let’s see if I find the courage to make a new version… The exercise is not entirely in vain, it appears…
Ok, I made a corrected (more or less…) version.
I’m still not happy, but I’ll leave it as it is. I notice that ει in στειβομένας is too short. The stress is always on the first syllable in my native language, so the problem is probably that I can’t “de-stress” the first syllable without shortening it. Same problem with λλ in πολλάκις – it’s a bit too short. Though perhaps not too short to be beyond what might be just possible in native speech, as in real speech this sort of thing might be articulated a bit carelessly.
@Μάρκος
πολλάκις δὲ εἲν ἰδεὶν παρὰ τὰς στειβόμενας ὁδοὺς και πώδον καὶ κείρων και αφθάλμων ανθρώπους.
χαίρετε φίλοι τὸ ὀνομὰ μου Μάρκος. ἐγὼ ἐχὼ δύο υἴς. και σείμερον δὴ τὼν δυτέρων υἴον μου πλούνειν τεὶν ἁμάξαν μου. Ἑρρόστε
@Paul (from http://archive.org/details/Anabasis1913)
πολλάκις δὴν ἰδεῖν πάρα τὰς στεβόμενας ὁδὼς καὶ πόδων καὶ χεῖρων καὶ ὀφθαλομὼν ἄνθρωπους.
I have to repeat a short sentence like this 20 or 30 times before I’m even remotely satisfied, and then recording the file, converting it and uploading all take their time.
That sounds like a recipe for burnout. Maybe I can suggest the following: Since feedback from other people is more important than perfection in something that is meant to be an exercise, why not do 2-3 practice read throughs, and then do your recording. In your recording, imagine that I’m sitting there trying to write down what you’re saying (which I will be). Go slowly, because you know that I have trouble transcribing speech, and if you misspeak, just correct yourself. I’ll be able to catch the correction.
For me, the criticisms of off-the-cuff recordings are actually more useful, because I start to find out what my bad habits are. And if you worry that you will sound stupid, well, join the club.
Round 2: Menander
I’m assuming that few people will be familiar with this fragment. I read it twice, once slow, and and once fast. And sticking to the advice I gave Paul, I recorded it after 2-3 practice read-throughs. You can cheat and see the Greek by clicking “Show More” on the Youtube page. Maybe it would be best to do that after a transcription, but before recording your own audio?
Also, Paul, here is the app that I use to upload to Youtube. You don’t have to add an image.
This is how I hear it (I think Markos doesn’t attempt to reconstruct pitch accents, so I suppose the aim is stress any accented syllable the same way?)
πολλάάκις δὲ εἲν ἰδεὶν παρὰ τὰς στειβόμενας ὁδοὺς και πόδων καὶ χείρων και αφθάλμων ανθρώπους.
ω in πόδων and χείρων is just “in the limit” acceptable as long, so I resolve the matter in your favor! 
Hmm… I disagree about δὴν, which I think I pronounce with a circumflex, only I think I manage not to overdo it for once 
With πάρα, πόδων and ἄνθρωπους you’re probably right. I think the problem is, again, the stress accent on the first syllable in Finnish. Here, I do think I manage to get the pitch accent at the right place (or what do you think?), but at the same time, I’m unable to avoid stressing the first syllable. So we get words with two accents, one of pitch and one of stress! στεβόμενας is similar, except for some reason I stress the second syllable – I think the pitch is correct, no?
I have to repeat a short sentence like this 20 or 30 times before I’m even remotely satisfied, and then recording the file, converting it and uploading all take their time.
That sounds like a recipe for burnout. Maybe I can suggest the following: Since feedback from other people is more important than perfection in something that is meant to be an exercise, why not do 2-3 practice read throughs, and then do your recording. In your recording, imagine that I’m sitting there trying to write down what you’re saying (which I will be). Go slowly, because you know that I have trouble transcribing speech, and if you misspeak, just correct yourself. I’ll be able to catch the correction.
For me, the criticisms of off-the-cuff recordings are actually more useful, because I start to find out what my bad habits are. And if you worry that you will sound stupid, well, join the club.
The way I see it, the pitch accent makes sense only in the context of a longer utterance. So in my opinion, it’s a good idea to try to construct a whole sentence at a time, to try to see how the language might work in longer chunks. Since it’s difficult, it takes many, many repeats before getting it even remotely right. But it’s much more profitable to try to do it really as well as possible, at least a couple of times, especially as we don’t have native speakers to correct us.
I know I should go slower, but that’s just something I’ve never learnt to do, unless I really, really concentrate, not even in my own language… It’s a speech defect of some sort, if you know how to fix it, tell me! It’s easier with poetry.
ὁδὼς – the ου/ω contrast is a typical problem, namely that different languages map vowels differently. We tend to take the closest equivalent from our own native tongue, regardless of how close they actually are. ι ει η is another problem. Here, Ι think I’m making a clear distinction between ου and ω, but in English the sounds are mapped differently and the way I pronounce them makes them indistinguishable to you. I wonder what Plato would have said here…
For ι ει η I suppose French is a much better guide than either Finnish or English (for the quality, not quantity).
I don’t share your joint perception of Markos’ accents (apart from substitution of dynamic stress for pitch, of course). Sure he gets στειβομένας wrong but he gets the accent right on all three genitives. I pronounce them pretty much the same way myself.
(Joel likewise misrepresents Paul’s accents.)
I very much like Paul’s reading. If he has trouble escaping the bonds of his native phonology, so do all readers of whatever nationality. (I don’t even try, myself.)
I’ll record the Menander later if I can.
I’d advise taking my transcriptions with a large grain of salt. I listen through 9-10 times and try to write out everything faithfully, but I know plenty of people with a superior ear than me. Hopefully I (and all of us) will get better. If I spot something, and you don’t, it’s probably just me.
On circumflex – in a stress-based accent, is there any way to tell the circumflex from acute / grave simply from pronunciation? I assume that a grave is stressed.
Joel, you have fingered what to my mind is the main deficiency of a stress-based pronunciation: circumflex and acute are stressed identically (at least that’s how I do it) — a grave objection in principle, but in practice, to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Greek accentual system, there’s rarely if ever any ambiguity.
Insofar that a grave means “no accent yet,” it is not stressed. To stress καὶ, for instance, would be a sin. But the system of written accents itself is inexact, and in a case such as τύχη λογισμὸν καὶ τὰ προσδοκώμενα I will unhesitatingly put stress on the ultima of λογισμὸν. It depends on circumstances, and prosodic environment; there can be only so much distance between accents/stresses.
Michael
I listened to it again and agree with you now about the genitives. So I guess what bothers me is that the ω’s are maybe a bit too short, especially for a stressed syllable.
Would you think that an grave is pronounced with a rise in pitch i.e. like an acute when it occurs at caesura? E.g.
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχήν / καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.