grave accent pronunciaton

Greek Learning Greek
1

the Homer topic incited me to ask a question that has been disturbing me for some time now. I don’t know if the question belongs exactly here, but it concerns Greek in general rather than only poetry, so I’m posting in the general section.

I’m just developping my hexameter reading skills using William Annis’s mp3 files along with prof. Nagy’s treatment of a passage from the Odyssey and I find these quite useful to adjust my ear to this type of reciting (in my Classical department they use the traditional ‘marching’ approach).

I noticed that William in his recordings treated the final grave as a lack of pitch.

I recall that such was the position, in his book on Archilochus, of a scholar for whom I share William’s high opinion, prof. Harris.

but I’m left rather unconvinced.

firstly, since καλός by itself has a high pitch on the last syllable, why we should insist that this high pitch dissappear in καλὸς ποιμήν?

secondly, in an expression such as ἀνὴ? καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθὸς ἔ?χεται, if we hold that all the grave accents signify lack of pitch, we should insist that phrases like that were mumbled monotonously by the Greeks, which is inconsistent with what at least I know about speech in any language.

thirdly, if both α and ὰ signify lack of pitch, why the grammarians deemed that they should be written with different diacritics? couldn’t it just look like: ἀνη? καλος και ἀγαθος ἔ?χεται, where accents are put just on the places with pitch?

my opinion is that grave accent was just a graphical variety of the acute written under certain conditions (at the word-end when a word with written accent follows). and it should be pronounced like an acute.

the only words for which I make exception are μέν, δέ, καί and the like, which imho became proclitics very early in Greek, as they are now.

2

Nope, for two reasons.

  1. The grave accent was sometimes written to indicate all unaccented syllables (not very efficiently): ἔλὰβὸν.

  2. The grammarians were very clear that word-final acute was altered. How exactly isn’t clear as we might like, and there are two schools of thought contending, the Lowered School and the Removed School. I go with the Removed school, and don’t pronounce any pitch rise for grave-marked syllables. The Lowered School says that the pitch was lower than the acute, but still higher than non-accented.

Saying that a non-pausal final acute had no accent does not mean everything was recited in a monotone, only that contrastive pitch was removed.

3

when I juxtapose my doubts with your (right) objections, I come to the conclusion that this sounds most reasonable.

as you noticed, the grave representing absence of pitch was a very unlucky attempt on the part of grammarians, and it soon fell out of use, as far as I know.

then the grave mark came to be used for something contrasting both with the acute/circumflex and with non-accented syllables.
this could only be:

  1. a rise of pitch - because grave comes on the place of pausal acute when that becomes non-pausal, and thus should be of somewhat the same nature as the acute
  2. but a rise of pitch to a different degree - because otherwise grammarians wouldn’t bother themselves to keep two diacritical signs for the same pitch.
4

After some reading and some oral practice, I came to the conclusion that, like many tonal languages, the grave accent simply meant that the syllable should be pronounced with a normal pitch, i.e, normal everyday intonation (except in cases where the speaker would like to give emphasis to the some particular syllable, when the pitch could be altered, like in musical performances, where accents had no relation to the notes of the score). Being so, the grave accent can only occur in relation to other accents (like the acute and the circumflex), as it actually does, when the pitch cluster changes from one syllable to another. For this reason I really do not believe the grave could normally mark a descending tone, like in the always quoted Chinese example mà , for if it were so it should forcibly appear on isolated words or syllables. Also, I believe that Greek accents were not pure pitch accents, but they must have had some stress component inherent to them, like in modern Croatian, for instance. But these matters are subject to eternal surmise and revision and tomorrow I may be proved completly wrong.

5

it is at times like this that I regret being too lazy to get all my Uni course books from my mom’s house.

Anyway, in a dictionary of the Modern Greek by prof Bambiniotis the definition of grave states: the prosodical (?)(or is it intonation? )accent. When pronounced, the tone is not in higher pitch (does not ascend in pitch) (like it does with oxeia/ accute accent), but either is lowered (if the syllable before takes an accute accent), or remains neuter

It goes on to say how Plato first used it how it was used in Hellenistic times etc

6

i’m still waiting for someone to quote the conclusion/evidence of the only book which has actually presented the evidence on this… devine and stephens 1994, which looks at both the literature and the extant greek music patterns…

i’ve summarised their results into a 1-page doc on an old old website here:

http://iliad.envy.nu/

why doesn’t anyone ever refer to this book? it’s the authority. it’s 1994, so it’s been around for a while…

7

I’ve always understood the accents to mean: acute indicate a rising pitch; grave indicates a falling pitch; circumflex indicates a rising-then-falling pitch.

8

I do not think that we will be someday in a position as to state anything about the archaic prosody with completely certainty, or to point to some “conclusive” evidence, which could only be a record of Plato, or Aristotle, or Xenophon (and for Attic dialect only). But I am confident that we can get an approximate view of what to accept and what to dismiss.

For example, it is clear to me that theories that propose a muscial pitch (rise or lower the accent by intervals of a third or fifth, or any other musical interval) miss the point, and can only render a ridiculous, almost unbearable pronounciation of Greek. The interval between high and normal pitch must have been extremably variable, subjective and hardly perceivable to untrained ears, so, I think, we should always avoid too dramatic vocalizations when reading Greek out aloud.

I do not believe that Greek exhibited register tone, i.e, tones are compared to a standard tone in order to stablish minimal pairs, such as in Bantu languages, Greek, I think was more a contour tone langague, where the shift from normal to high to normal was the decisive element in identifying phonemes and words; moreover, this shift (normal-high-normal) was felt as ascending in its first part and descending in its second part.

A profitable discussion about the meaning of “tone” and “pitch accent” may be found here [u]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)[/u]

:slight_smile:

R. de B.

9

i’m still waiting for someone to quote the conclusion/evidence of the only book which has actually presented the evidence on this… devine and stephens 1994, which looks at both the literature and the extant greek music patterns…

Chad, could you gives the complete bibliographical information about Devine and Stephen’s book? :laughing:

Thanks!

10

hi, here’s the ref:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1995/95.07.05.html

it’s difficult to read as the review says, but it’s as authoritative as dionysius of halicarnassus’ ancient statement that the pitch accent involved about a musical 5th interval.

on the latter point, i’ve never read any convincing reason for textually emending “5th” to “3rd” or anything else, it just says what it says, simple.

i haven’t looked at pronunciation stuff for a few years now, but when i started, i just read vox graeca, devine and stephens, and dionysius of hal over a weekend, and tried to simply adopt all of their conclusions into a technique (which is definitely not certain, but i think it generally comes close), rather than emend or discard these authorities without basis.

11

I must admit I am now somewhat disencouraged to buy D&S book after reading Dobrov’s review. May be in the future.

One last teasing question, though: If the grave accent does mark a falling pitch, why is it never used to distinguish minimal pairs, as it happens, e.g., between kûdos and kúdos?

R. de B.

12

Grave accents only occur in certain environments; they aren’t true features of the words themselves. Therefore, they can’t be used in this way.

13

hi, the grave doesn’t mark a falling pitch.

14

Grave accents only occur in certain environments; they aren’t true features of the words themselves. Therefore, they can’t be used in this way.



hi, the grave doesn’t mark a falling pitch.

Ok, then we all agree on this point.