We all know there’s only one correct way to write Ancient Greek, and every other way is utterly wrong, either an absurd leftover from Antiquity or the Middle Ages, or a stupid modernisation. Only we don’t know which is what. I propose a democratic vote in the old Athenian way, open to all members of Textkit!
I wanted to make a poll with that asks about each spelling convention separately, but apparently that’s not possible. Instead, you get to vote what you don’t like. (Vote for as many as you want!)
See if a mod can edit it or just make a new thread? I get what you’re going for and I don’t really wish to get involved since I haven’t read the older thread…
Also, you’re all wrong. ; is a perfectly respectable marker for questions. It’s what is used in modern times*, it looks nice and I don’t think it’s “ultra modern” in that it arose around the same time (9th century? 10th?) as the Latinate equivalent, though I really don’t remember.
At present, the results are clear: one vote against each except medial beta and lunate sigma. Let’s call Oxford University Press and Loeb tell them they should change their printing conventions: βάρϐαροϲ!
What witchcraft is this!? Haha I’ll be meeting with someone from the press soon incidentally and I will tell them…absolutely nothing of the sort since the medial b is ugly.
EDIT: Also I don’t think I’ve seen it outside of France and, oddly, some communist brochures I picked up in Nafplio once when I was accidentally a communist.
The orthographic reform I would like to see most is keeping the rough breathing but getting rid of the smooth breathing as unnecessary. The irony is that often if the text is small and blurry, you can not tell if the breathing is smooth or rough, which would not be a problem if you got rid of one or the other.
Sorry, I forgot. And I suppose Homer really wrote in boustrophedon, I should have included that too…
That’s actually something I’ve thought about too, but I didn’t remember to include that option. It’s really annoying sometimes. But really it’s only a problem with bad reprints of old books, even my OCT Homers are like that. New books are printed out of computer files, not bad scans, so I guess the problem doesn’t exist, unless the font is really bad. If I wasn’t such a conservative, I’d still definitely support this reform!
So you have actually seen Modern Greek printed with medial betas? That’s nice. I like them, because normal betas are pretty big and clumsy in most fonts, they don’t look so good inside words. And the rare times I write Greek on paper, I use them, mostly just for eccentricity’s sake though. But I didn’t know there was a political message too, I can use those betas to show my vaguely leftist sympathies…
Only after voting (but not caring a whole lot about any of them) did I notice the option without accents. I’d like to reapply all my against votes to this single one! Accents are indispensable, they pack so much information! Of all the diacritics they’re the very last I’d be willing to give up.
Like Markos I see no point whatever in the smooth breathing. Just another medieval relic, not serving any function that the naked letter wouldn’t. And its abandonment would save us having to squint to make out whether it’s rough or smooth: any breathing would be rough. In short, a wholly unnecessary bit of clutter. Latin marks only aspiration, not non-aspiration. Why shouldn’t Greek?
As to the rough, on the other hand, I would like to see aspiration consistently marked, including internally, e.g. εξανἕϲτηκε, προἱέναι (again, as in Latin, as it happens). In my experience most people respect only word-initial aspiration when reading aloud, but obviously they shouldn’t. This can aid comprehension too. (And it’s even in line with ancient practice!)
And while I’m about it, what validity does double aspiration as in e.g. καθ’ ἡμέραν have? Why not just καθ’ ημέραν, or better καθ’ημέραν without word-space?
As for transliteration, I tend to use q for theta, w for omega, h for eta. Just for myself and informal correspondence, of course. Not wholly satisfactory, but it usually works well enough.
I’d never thought of how pointless the ) was before, wow. Also, the old Teach Yourself Ancient Greek apparently didn’t use any accents whatsoever, on the basis that you may as well pronounce Greek like English and the lack of composition. Note, I don’t know this first hand hence apparently but why would my source lie?
I personally love accents. I agree on bad print though making stuff hard to discern, but who am I to complain? you should see my handwriting. I can proudly say I often make use of three scripts in which I am practically illegible and know several others in which I genuinely am illegible. One of the problems I had with Akkadian was the fact that I was essentially just assaulting the page with my pen…
I wouldn’t be too excited about modern medial bhtas since I think it was just a free font they had got hold of, communists and all that.
I remember reading somewhere (maybe Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca) that words like φίλιππος had internal aspiration when they were used as generic words (in this case “horse-loving”) but the aspiration tended to disappear with time when the words crystalized, for example in proper names (e.g. “Philip”). I don’t remember on what evidence this was concluded. Is there a consensus as to what words have internal aspiration and which do not? (I have no idea, I’m just wondering).
As to this vote, the results do look like very decisive. But I think it’s nice everybody likes accents! (BTW, I can confirm that the old Teach Yourself doesn’t have accents. I’ve never forgiven that book for having taught me bad habits.)
As to this vote, the results do not look like very decisive, that’s what I wanted to say…
I can’t imagine any other reason to dislike lunate sigma than traditionalism. I think it’s ok and I guess for papyri etc. it must be better, because you don’t always know what part of a word the sigma was in badly preserved writing.
The lunate sigma…when not at the end just looks terrible to my eyes. Anyway, Philipos. First thing that comes to mind is the near eastern regnal stuff after Alexander III’s conquests, they’re phonetic and don’t mention /h/ but then they’re errant in that they probably represent Macedonian pronunciation since the /ph/ is actually a voiced labiodental fricative like you’d expect from e.g zeirene vs seirene. So interesting, understudied, but also useless.
The question was not actually about φ⟩π but about aspirate on internal -ιππ. I can well believe it was lost in e.g. names such as P(h)il(h)ippos, i.e. in words where there was no longer much sense of its being a compound, but surely the aspirate was retained in e.g. εξανἕϲτηκε, προἱέναι, to repeat the examples I gave in my earlier post, and I wish it were represented in our texts, both as a practical matter (it would be useful) and for the sake of consistency. But if internal lunate sigma “looks terrible” to you, I guess this would too . As Paul indicates, traditionalism is a powerful thing.
I gathered what you meant, I was just pointing to an instance of phonetic transcription without the latter aspiration but then pointing out how odd that case was anyway.
Totally agree. I’ve always prayed publishers would see the light and get rid of smooth breathings - which are of no use to anyone but spectacle makers. Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t some enthusiast produce online versions of some key classical texts without smoothies. Could be billed initially as a ‘pedagogical aid’ for tyros. Later, they would become so sought after that everyone else would just have to follow suit. News would spread on Twitter leading to an Orthographical Spring. Just dreaming.
Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article showing the Lord’s Prayer in modern (monotonic) Greek - acute accents only and no breathings - side by side with a traditional polytonic version:
I found the passage in Allen, it’s p. 55. He seems to agree more or less with you. He says: “Latin transcriptions show considerable variation, and this may have been a feature of Greek speech itself; the presence of aspiration in such forms could well have depended upon the extent to which the two elements of the compound were still recognized as such by the speaker.”
But this sort of reasoning would mean that for a native Greek, /h/ didn’t properly belong word-internally - it could be accepted there only in compounds, and as soon as the word isn’t felt as a compound, the /h/ disappears. If this is the situation, how can we safely reconstruct internal aspiration everywhere? How do we always know whether the writer felt the word was a compound? (I don’t know anything about phonology, but why would /h/ disappear word-internally but not word-initially? Is there any other theory, like (just a guess) interference from psilotic dialects, on crystalized names like Philip?)
(Which is what I voted for…)
