I’ve recently gotten back into Greek, having studied it about 15 years ago in high school. Needless to say, it’s turning my brain into a pretzel, but I love it! Was just wondering if anyone had any advice on whether I should memorize and use the accent marks from the get-go. I’m sure the right answer is “yes,” but gee it would make my life easier to ignore them for a while. I am using the breathing-marks since it affects pronunciation.
Also, I’m using William Smith’s “A First Greek Course,” which I found on this site, but I’ve since realized there are a few others that are more recent. The Smith isn’t bad; I think I’ll continue in it unless someone tells me that another one is much better. I’ve only reached page nine, so it wouldn’t be terrible to switch at this point.
If you don’t learn the accenting rules, then there will always be a nagging feeling about the language that will ruin your love of it. Some little marks that in the back of your mind defeated you, laughing while they made mockery of your intellect.
Learn the rules, once you do, you’ll feel so much better.
Now, these are for Homeric greek, and I honestly don’t know if they are applicable to Attic greek. Hopefully, someone here can chime in and clear up the ambiguity.
Christ, you must be some kind of savant. I’m reading the rules and my head is swimming! “THIS DOES THIS AND THIS EXCEPT FOR THIS AND THIS” is all I’m seeing. Ok so ai is considered short except in the optative and some other specific location? And now there are 20 or so more of these kinds of rules? How does anyone get them all straight? More importantly, how do I get them all straightened out while still learning the other parts of greek?
White had a decent explanation of the accents. so helpful! I haven’t gotten around to reading everything people suggested, but thanks for sending and i will take a look. i remembered having learned the rules in the past once I read White. Smith wasn’t all that helpful on this . . . He didn’t really address them, unless i missed something. but i like the vocabulary and exercises in smith, so “Sir William” stays!
I am in the current Homeric pharr ‘C’ study group. I am learning the very thing you are 'swimming 'with. I am breaking it down in little bits and reviewing these for a few minutes before I do my excersises.
the first thing I tried to memorize is the names of the accent marks.
second thing I worked on is knowing the syllables name and locations.
I have worked on memorizing the syllables to accents. (ie. accute on all last three syllables named antipenult, penult, and ultima. circumflex last two syllables, grave only on last one.
the next thing I memorized is the ‘oxytone’ rule. when the last syllable has an accute and it is followed by another word without separation of a puntuation it becomes a grave. ( this you don’t see in the vocabularies but in excersises)
now I am trying to memorize my long vowels and diphthongs for the next couple of accenting rules.
Sashimii sushii is pretty good but try to swallow the whole fish and you choke.
(quotation: “…The apparently complex “rules” of Greek accentuation can be understood in terms of a single general principle involving the concepts of contonation and mora…”)
I do say that I beg to differ, that tutorial sucks. Read it backwards, then it’ll make sense. I’m serious, read the beginning about contonation and mora, then just skip right to the end and read it chapter by chapter backwards.
Also, the things about William’s rules is that you don’t memorize them all at once. What you do is you look at a word you need to accent and say “verb or not verb?”, then based on that find the location of the accent given the rules, then the type of accent. After a while (being defined as a couple of weeks), you refer less and less to the rules until they become internalized.
If you really want to learn it well, then accent a ton of verb forms first until those rules become internalized, then the non-verbs are much simpler.
That is by design. The accent tutorials are simply a gateway to help you internalize correct accenting. The rules I use explain nothing, at least in the philological sense.
In my opinion the contonation work is interesting - though it falls down on enclitics - but is no help to someone who cannot yet correctly accent words. Master the basics, then look at the contonation stuff, which might put your accenting abilities on a firmer ground.
But i think reading the berkley tutorial makes your tutorial make more sense. Instead of some rules being, “DO THIS THIS WAY!”, it’s more, “This is how you do it, and this is why.”
i think why (when it does exist) has ever higher priority to understand than how in any matter that one wanted to learn. of course it demands more intelectual work than memorizing a list, but i think the very learning is based upon understanding more than memorizing. not ?
sorry by my writing, i am not english speaker,
(but it is not so bad . not?)
I actually followed your tutorial better after learning about the rules of contonation and mora! Would you teach a student all the different types of bonds between oxygen and other molecules before teaching them about how valence and electrons come into play?
No, but neither do I believe the contonation system actually explains Greek accent. It’s another model to produce correct answers.
But people should use whatever model of accenting they wish, so long as it produces the correct answers when they compose and, more to the point, helps them recognize when something funky is going on in any wild texts they’re reading.
Well, now I have a lot of things to read in addition to working on my Greek exercises (sigh)! But thanks again everyone. I agree that learning the “why” along with the “how” cements learning.
A few years ago I lived in Thailand; alas, I never learned too much of the language, but the English transcription of Thai uses the acute, grave, and circumflex accents to denote pitch. Like in Greek, acute meant a higher pitch, and circumflex meant a rise-and-fall. (Grave meant a lower pitch, but apparently for ancient Greek no one is sure that’s what the grave accent meant as far as pronunciation?) Foreigners had a hard time with Thai because they couldn’t get the pronunciation; it was brutal because most words had “doppelgangers” that were spelled the same but with different accents. Quite easy to make boo-boos.
At any rate, it makes it easier for me to memorize where the accent is if I can pronounce the word to myself (albeit badly).
I don’t remember learning this in high school. I must have repressed it!
I know all this struggle will be worth it if one day I can read Plato.
I am saying over and over again, just forget all that stuff about pitch sounds and how the ancients spoke them. We just and simple do not know how to do this, and there is no one person on earth to teach you how to do it. All that stuff you’ll find in books are just guesses, aimed for academical studies exclusively, but never follow them. Stick to accent pronunciation. Otherwise, and if you persist on that pitch sounds, why don’t you make your own system, and circulate it in the wolrd wide web? Believe me, your system won’t be different than the other systems made by Pharr or Alen or whatever those proffesors are called. In either case your speach will sound like Chinese (well in your case maybe more like Thai I had to admit), and no one will ever be able to get a word what you are reading other than if one does not have the text infront of his eyes to follow you. Forget the pitches and keep your effort to accents, like in the English language. I persist on this, except if you want to waist your time and effort and all your energy to learn something totally useless that is by the way also (with mathematical accuracy) totally wrong. The beauty of Greek lies only in the vocabulary and grammar, nothing else. Tell me btw- could you learn the Thai pronunciation, if there wasn’t any Thai to teach you how to keep the accents?
I disagree. Every culture/language that I ever heard of likes to play with its sounds. My theatre classes stress the importance of recognizing assonance and consonance and how it influences the piece, especially when dealing with Shakespeare.
Granted, I do not think mastering any kind of pitch system is essential to appreciating Ancient Greek, and of course nobody knows how it actually was pronounced. But dealing with the sounds and the rhythm is essential to any kind of poetry. And even though nobody knows how each word was pronounced, we do have evidence of what it might have sounded like.
Anyway, just because we can’t get perfections doesn’t mean we can’t try and get something marginally accurate.
(This post reflects the “Glottal” in my greek geekiness)
