Has anyone the faintest idea of how someone should approach the self-study of greek/latin phonetics? I have good books with loads of information, and I’m quite motivated to learn those zillion little rules of how sounds evolved. But is it just that to it, memorizing rules? and should you memorize all of them, most of them or just the most important?
How should I start? It seems so exciting to have power over mutations, ablauts and the daunting morphology of greek!
Well, what books do you have access to already? I don’t want to recommend books you already have. But I’ll give a list of useful resources in ascending order of complexity.
For general phonetics any good linguistics textbook would work for that. This base of understanding is important for when you encounter phrases like “feature assimilation” and “labialized velar stop.” Also, knowing the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is useful.
For a good account of Greek and Latin phonetics emphasizing development at the height of their use, are Allen’s Vox Graeca and Vox Latina. For a less technical account of the same information, plus things like literary stylistics, Palmer also has a duet, The Greek Language and The Latin Language.
For full mastery of ablauts and mutations you will need the dauntingly dense New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, by Sihler. I highly recommend Fortson’s ndo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction before Sihler’s work, however. It’s an intro to the theory and practice of historical linguistics in general, and includes mutations and daunting morphology for dozens of languages, including Greek and Latin.
Hi William, thanks for the feedback!
Well, I got Sihler’s for christmas and it is really exciting 
I also have Theoretical bases of Indo-european linguistics by Winfred P. Lehman, and an old short book about latin phonetics.
I’m reasonably acquainted with the IPA chart so I understand when you say “labialized velar stop”, BUT I know only vaguely about “feature assimilation” or “dissimilation”, “dissimilatory effects” etc; So if you knew a book which explains basic terminology that would be great.
I think I’ll add vox graeca and latina to my wish list as well as Indo-european language and culture:an introduction. but any other recommendation would be very welcome too
Actually, nothing else comes to mind at the moment. All the really cutting-edge excitement in historical linguistics comes from disputes worked out in journal articles.