For a long time I have noticed that the introduction to Paul’s letter to the Romans does not hit my ear like normal prose. Instead it is very sonorous. Now looking at it carefully, I notice the stretch of long syllables at the beginning, and throughout many dactyls and spondee.
Two conclusions from this: 1) Paul is sensitive to vowel length in the first century AD. This may put some geographical limitations on his Greek dialect. 2) Paul probably has a number of pet phrases – listen to good American Black preachers in the South to hear this sort of thing – that sound especially sonorous, and that he likes to sprinkle through his letters. The result isn’t as lyrical as poetry, but isn’t prose either.
It may even be possible that some lyrical sensitivity would help resolve a few minor textual questions.
I’m not sure I buy that Paul’s spoken Greek made vowel-length distinctions. The view now is that vowel length was already disappearing in the 4th century BC in Athens among the common people. By the time of the 1st century the Koine had completely lost vowel length except among the very educated. Paul was well educated, and it’s clear that he was familiar with Greek literature, so I would not be surprised if he had learned to read poetry in meter with vowel lengths, but that doesn’t imply that his spoken Greek distinguished between ο and ω. Similar to how one can learn to read KJV English very well and even be able to imitate it and yet their everyday language is contemporary. Even if he were writing with an ear to the vowel lengths, the effect would be completely lost when the letters were read out loud in the congregations.
Are you talking of syllables or vowels? It makes a difference.
I’m sceptical. I don’t see/hear anything really remarkable about it. Does Paul’s writing show sensitivity either to vowel length or to rhythm (which is a matter of syllabic sequence)? I’ve never investigated (though I’m sure others have), but reading it hasn’t left me with the impression that it does. Rather he wrote as he spoke—vigorous rhetoric, strong imagery. His training will have ingrained in him a feel for striking thought and correspondingly striking expression. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there are rhythmical elements in some of his clausulae, but if there are they’re neither prominent nor consistent (nor calculated?). I’d be extremely surprised if any geographical or textual conclusions can be drawn (unlike in Longus, say, where textual choices quite often depend on rhythmical considerations). What does Norden say in Die Antike Kunstprosa?
Yes. I think that Horrocks, et al are clearly wrong about when vowel length distinctions began to disappear.
The Seiklos epitaph shows that pitch accent still had an effect on music as late as 1st or 2nd century AD (and Horrocks claims that pitch and length distinctions disappeared at nearly the same time as vowel length distinctions).
According to the Horrocks theory, Greek poetry continued to observe vowel length distinction for hundreds of years after no one cared about it anymore. Not impossible, I guess, even if it strains credulity. I certainly don’t know the inscriptional and papyrological evidence well at all.
Yet here is a street preacher absolutely hammering the long vowels. Almost like he spoke to audiences that cared about them.
EDIT: Just saw Michael’s comment, will reply shortly.
Control texts please. And how else would you say “Paul slave of Christ Jesus”? And the rest of the sentence has only one accented (i.e. potentially “hammered”) long vowel out of 19 syllables. …
I meant long syllables, either by nature (containing a long vowel), or by position (when a vowel is followed by a sequence of two consonants).
I didn’t mean that he stressed these syllables as he spoke (which would not imply any relation to word accent), I just meant that he used lots of them in the introduction compared to the rest of the letter. A more precise way to state this would be:
Paul uses five or more long syllables in sequence several times in the opening of his letter to the Romans. In the argumentative parts of his letter, and in other parts of the NT, sequences of this length are comparatively rate.
Thank you for the recommendation of Die antike Kunstprosa. I skimmed through the Paul chapter just now, but my German isn’t good enough to comprehend it in detail, although the book looks like a wonderful read. Much of the discussion in that chapter, so far as I could make out, had to do with characterization of Paul’s rhetoric in comparison to Greeks (and others) of different times. But I didn’t see anything about his speech rhythms (it could be there, my German is pretty bad still). There is an earlier chapter on Die rhythmische Prosa, but it seems to only cover to the ancients.
My statement about geography should probably have been left out of the post. My impression is that Eastern Greek, especially where it had much contact with Coptic, lost vowel distinction early.
Sorry Joel it just won’t wash. There’s the opening Παῦλος δοῦλος χριστοῦ (which could sound impressive, but depends more on the “slave” idea for its effect), there’s a (Ι)ησου χριστου του κυρ(ιου), there’s another (Ι)ησου χριστου followed by a long after a comma, and there’s a quite unremarkable residue such as (δια των προ)φητων αυτου εν (γραφαις αυτου) and (χαρις) υμιν και ειρηνη (κεἰρηνη?)—nothing of significance. I see little sign here of him “absolutely hammering the long vowels” (still less the long syllables), regardless of what you mean by hammering. Only accented syllables would receive stress. I fear you’re fantasizing.
Looking at the previous page (Acts 28.17ff.) we have in the same length of text (chosen at random but I suspect not typical):
(συνκαλε)σασθαι αυτον τους οντας των (ι)ουδαιων πρωτοις (8 long sylls + 5)
(συν)ελθοντων δ’ αυτων (5)
ποιησας τω λαω η τοις (εθεσι) τοις πατρωοις δεσ(μιος) (6 or 8 + ?5)
(παρεδο)θην εις τας χειρας των Ρωμαιων, οι(τινες) (10)
(των Ι)ουδαιων ηναγκασθην (7)
ουχ ως του εθνους μου (5 or 6)
(δια) ταυτην ουν την αι(τιαν) (5)
For density of successive long syllables that more than matches what we have in the Romans greeting.
Of course there’s much more to euphony than syllable and vowel length, but my impression of Paul is that he’s very little concerned with euphony. The less the better, perhaps; I don’t think he’d want to sound smooth.
Just when and how various vowel lengths were levelled is a separate question, for which Pauline evidence is negligible, I’d say.
I don’t find that it strains credulity to suggest that poetry continued to observe vowel length for centuries after it dropped out of the common speech. The poetry was produced by a highly educated upper class. It’s indisputable that writers during the “Second Sophistic” intentionally wrote in an archaic ''Atticizing" style that is quite different from the Koine we find in the NT. Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and even phonology can all be targets of a conservative style. Written Latin remained very conservative even as the early Romance languages were forming. In fact, it’s hard for linguists to work out the exact details of how Latin broke up into the Romance languages because the educated people were not writing the way the language was spoken. Elements of the spoken language pop up here and there, but for centuries Late Latin pretty much ignored the spoken language and stubbornly adhered to an older form of the language.
As far as the evidence is concerned, Randall Buth gives an overview of some of the evidence here: http://www.biblicallanguagecenter.com/koine-greek-pronunciation/ The inscriptional and papyrological evidence is one of the reasons the ‘Greek-pronunciation-has-never-changed’ fanatics have a leg to stand on. The evidence suggests that during the latter part of the Koine period the language was approaching the modern pronunciation, but they try to make it say much more, i.e. that Plato sounded just like a modern speaker in Athens.
I’m aware of the theory, I’m just not necessarily convinced by the evidence presented for it. The material in Bluth’s pdf is mostly taken from Horrocks.
You’ve convinced me that it’s not sequences of long vowels, But all that I can say is that the opening of Romans hits my ear entirely differently from that section of Acts, which feels like normal prose. I’ll see if I can find out why (or whether it’s all in my head).
Joel, I’m curious what kind of evidence you would expect to find. From what I understand the papyri show widespread confusion between ο/ω ε/αι υ/οι and ι/ει, but otherwise the spellings are pretty stable, i.e. η isn’t confused with ι or ει, etc. I don’t know how else to explain that except that the sounds were not distinguishable to the writers. Compare modern Spanish, which has a very phonetic orthography, but a common misspelling among uneducated writers is confusing b/v, precisely because those two letters represent only one phoneme in modern Spanish.
I know that in Latin quantitative meters were being used long after the vowel lengths dropped out of speech. For instance, from the appendix of A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin there are examples of both accentual (stress-based) and quantitative hymns. Veni Creator Spiritus and Gloria Laus are both hymns written in the 9th century and they are based on a quantitative meter, even though they were written at the same time as the Oaths of Strasbourg which are considered the first written example of Old French. The fact that Latin hymns were written in quantitative meter long after vowel length dropped out of Latin and even after the language morphed into the early Romance languages shows us the power that a prestigious form of a language can have such as Classical Latin or Classical Greek.
You know, I wonder if what you are hearing is simply construct chains (strings of genitives) which can create a sort of harmony. I dusted off an unread monograph from the long past days when I was purcasing them at $5 a copy from a local book store. Listening to the Text: Oral Patterning in Paul’s Letters, John D Harvey, Baker 1999. No discussion of vowl length that I could locate.
EDIT:
"oral style is not characterized by mechanical meter, but by
a rhythm that has ease of memorization as its aim” (Harvey 1998:4)
Meter isn’t discussed in most books on NT Greek. N. Turner in vol. 4, Style of Moulton_Howard_Turner pp. 106, 140 mentions meter in reference to Hebrews and 2nd Peter. Re: Hebrews " … skilled oratory, sense of rhythm, avoiding monotony by mingling meters of various kinds" cites Hebrews ICC J. Moffet, 1924, lvi-lxiv. According to Turner 2nd Peter appears to dabble in iambic meter, 2pet 2:1,3,4 ICC Bigg p227 and 2pet 1:19, 2:4,8,32 J. B. Mayor 2nd Peter & Jude, p lix.
Joel, Could your impression by conditioned by what you hear as the sonorousness of the opening three or four words, enhanced by all the portentous phrasing that follows—that huge creed-like description of “his son,” the relentess piling up of phrases and clauses, the recurrence (hammering?) of “called” and “holy” and “Jesus Christ,” and so forth? It’s intense. And all in a single monster sentence that just goes on unrolling. (It’s an OTT variant of the epistolary opening formula “X to Y χαίρειν.”) I’d look more to verbal and syntactical features (something like Stirling’s “construct chains” but more broadly conceived) than to purely phonetic ones.
@mwh That’s certainly possible, but whatever it is, I don’t hear it so much in the modern Greek version (I listen to a fair amount of audio with a modern Greek pronunciation, and often enjoy it).
Here is someone reading Romans 1 in a modern pronunciation (I’m sorry that there’s not much expression here. I also have a modern Greek pronunciation recording by Spiros Zodhiates which is far better):
And here I am again reading Acts 27, which we were comparing it to as normal prose. It certainly does not have (to my ear) whatever it is that makes Romans 1 interesting:
This is not Greek reading. It is virtually impossible that Paul’s contemporaries who spoke Koine sounded anything like this. But I must say that it’s highly entertaining in a flamboyant sort of way - - to, to, ku ku, ka, ka ,toe toe, ouuu, kaie, oi (as in _oi_l) etc.
Here is someone reading Romans 1 in a modern pronunciation (I’m sorry that there’s not much expression here.):
Hitler> : How can this be ? What is a seminary if not resistant to change and 20 or 30 years behind in all it does ? We have kept this all a secret for so long. > We have produced generations of odd sounding biblical illiterates> . They will truly get Greek now ? A new pronunciation , a new teaching and learning style,.. immersion and conversion. Students are supposed to fear and hate Greek. And most important of all, forget Greek immediately after they have taken it !
Henchman > : This is how we advance our agenda of biblical illiteracy!
Hitler> : > Get the top scholars speak to publish and teach with Erasmian and with dry, boring grammars and we will remain victorious .If students learn to speak Greek which leads to thinking in Greek .. they will become better interpreters of the bible! > This is dangerous… And yes it has been working. But CKI is on the verge of something big!..Are you a turncoat, have you stopped using Erasmian? “WWWconversationalkoine.com” the conversational koine institute, …“Get Greek.” I guess it’s true. …
Isaac, instead of mocking others’ pronunciation like an immature child, why not be useful and make some recordings yourself? I use the reconstructed Koine pronunciation which seems to be the one that you are advocating. Make a separate recording for each chapter starting with Matthew and going all the way through Revelation. When you’re done with that it would be great if you recorded the entire Septuagint as well. When all of that is done, since you are the only one around here who really understands Ancient Greek and has fluency in it, it would be a great service to us all if you wrote a number of short stories in idiomatic Greek.
