Dear Textkitanici, I’m having some trouble digesting bits and pieces of information that I’ve gathered here and there concerning stress and pitch:
William Harris, in The Musical pitch accents in Greek says: “(…) Greek had no stresses (…)”
Benner, in his Selections from Homer’s Iliad says: “The first syllable of each foot is emphasized in oral reading. This stress of the voice is called ictus (…)”
Our own annis says somewhere in this forum (I quote from memory, and excuse me if I misunderstood): “Even if indeed the accents represent a change in pitch, that change is accompanied by stress.” (Side question: Do graves loose the pitch but save the stress?)
My conclusion is that, when reading dactylic hexameters, one would use the accents for pitch, disregard them for stress, stress every ictus (metrics overpowering individual words), and emphasize the stress where an accent falls on the ictus. Does that make sense?
This is an older practice. Well, I call it older. I suppose it is still taught in most schools. If you’re going to go for a reconstructed pronunciation - pitch accent, attending carefully to vowel length - I would ignore Benner’s advice here. In fact, I would advise tossing the whole “ictus” idea out the window.
Our own annis says > somewhere in this forum > (I quote from memory, and excuse me if I misunderstood): “Even if indeed the accents represent a change in pitch, that change is accompanied by stress.”
I don’t think I would say that, but would say what Eureka said I would say.
Will, if I toss the ictus out the window, where do I stress? The only alternatives that I can think of are stressing the accented vowels, or sounding flat. Could it be stressing based on phrase intonation rather than individual words? That would mean having to actually understand what you’re saying!
Several languages (including one major European one) get along fine without any stress accent, or a greatly reduced one. The pitch accent is the word accent in Greek.
The only alternatives that I can think of are stressing the accented vowels, or sounding flat. Could it be stressing based on phrase intonation rather than individual words?[
If we’re using the word “stress” here to indicate “volume,” then I would say absolutely.
That would mean having to actually > understand > what you’re saying!
I think some Latin grammarians mentioned the ictus, otherwise it wouldn’t even be called that (ictus is Latin for “stress”)
I’ve read about it in my favourite Vox Graeca by W.S. Allen. There, Allen concludes that long (or rather “heavy”) syllables had a greater stressability than the “light” ones, which implies they tended to be more emphasized while reciting poetry.
Nevertheless, the problem remains with steps like the spondee. It has two “heavy” syllables, i.e. two “stressable” syllables, of which we’re used to put the stress only on the first one. Why?
Also, in iambic trimeters, it sometimes occurs that a step consists of three short syllables, and here too we tend to put the stress on one of them, although, according to Allen’s theory, they all shound be “non-stressable”.
I guess the verse rhythm has something to do not only with some inherent quality of the syllables themselves, but also with some sort of musical rhythmic measures superimposed on the syllables regardless on whether they sometimes happened to be of the “wrong” kind.
But, then again, when we speak of musical measures, we cannot dispense with the idea of stress/ictus. There’s simply no other way.
hi, i’m not really following this because i just follow the lengths and pitches in greek, and the lengths and pitch + stress in latin. i don’t know about this ictus stuff. in greek, you definitely don’t stress either long syllables or accented syllables unless your own judgment of the whole clause demands for added emphasis there, and that’s just subjective, i usually don’t try to stress at all unless i really understand a clause and have practiced it. in latin, i only stress the syllables with the word accent: you don’t stress a syllable just because it’s long. i think the ictus stuff is artificial…
I don’t know about these things; I just know that the last time I appeared in front of an audience with a skull on my hand and proclaimed:
“to BE, or NOT to BE, that IS the QUESTion” in an impeccable iambic rhythm, I was laughed off stage.
My objection to the arsis/thesis terminology is this: I don’t march Homer, I recite it. It might be appropriate vocabulary for an anapestic run in Euripides for an entrance march, but I’m less convinced it’s usefull for discussing Homer or non-choral verse.
you’re right. but music theory isn’t my strong side. So i can’t take part in the consideration.
but here’s one more point that just came to my mind as I was reading Theognis a while ago: syllables that are “long by position”, like the first syllable in [size=134]κέντρον[/size] were not really long, at least not as long as the first syllable in [size=134]σκῆπτρον
I read it on my own. but, actually, I’ve had a class on some passages by him some time ago.
Already we’re in a little trouble. In those languages which have long and short vowels, very few have a short:long ratio of 2:1. I believe 1.2:1 is the lowest and about 1.8:1 is quite common. So this mora system is already very likely a bit artificial.
Maybe you’re right. But, still, the idea of “chronos protos” and the measurement proportions quoted by me are given by the ancient musicians. The whole “mora” thing is based on this, and the contemporary scholarly idea of “mora” is, in fact, a reflexion of the idea of “chronos protos”, which is a notion of the native speakers of Ancient Greek. I’ve no reason not to trust them - even if they’re a bit inaccurate from a modern phonological point of view.
No, because even if the phonetic reality isn’t so neat, the poetic practice followed it. Some modern languages still arrange verse by syllable lengths, and some of those would consider a closed syllable with a long vowel longer than an open syllable with a long vowel (Urdu is one, I believe). So we have comparisons to make, and Greek does appear to consider heavy and extra-heavy syllables the same as far as the meter is concerned.
I’d like to know more about Indian meter. in fact, it was discussed in a book by the so-often-quoted W.S.Allen, as well as by a study of A.Meillet making a comparison of the Greek and the Vedic practice. But I’m not acquainted with those.
You have convinced me, William. You also agree with the best homeric performers that I know, Danek and Hagel ( http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/ ). On their web page, past the bibliography, they talk about hot issues like enjambment and phraseology.
I also like the “flow to the caesura and ebb to the end of the line” metaphor for the hexameter better than the “marching to certain death” one.
There’s a few interesting things in that abstract: “Thus, early Greek hexameter poetry is likely to have been sung to a fixed set of four notes, the melody governed by word accent and sentence intonation.”
4 notes? That would make pitch modeling very easy. “The performance of Ancient Greek verse, as heard today, which involves the so called ictus which overrides the word accents, has nothing in common with the ancient pronunciation.”
OK then.
“With some training anyone who is able to read Homer can achieve to improvise the melody to any given Homeric text easily.”
“The Greek aoidoi sang in unison with the accompaniment of the four-stringed phorminx, which implicates the use of only four notes for the melody, too.”
Perhaps the other three strings on the kithara were only used between verses…
So, Bardo… You don’t happen to understand German do you?
So i can’t take part in the consideration.
That would make pitch modeling very easy.