How am I supposed to pronounce double accents?

Χαίρετε!
I’ve learned that, when a proclitic follows a proparoxytone or a properispomena, the word gets a second accent: “Δικαιόπολις Ἀθηναῖός ἐστιν” (The first line of Athenaze). The question is, how am I supposed to pronounce it? Should I say both accented syllables equally “loudly”? Or should the second accent sound weaker than the first, but loudier than the atone syllables (in case anyone knows Portuguese, this happens in the word “cafezinho”, in which the syllable “fe”, because it is tonic when the word is in the positive form, “ca”, is stronger than “ca” and “nho”, but weaker than “zi”, which is the tonic of this word)?

Much thanks,
John

Hi John, It’s not a matter of volume or “strength” but rather of pitch. With Αθηναῖός ἐστιν the -ναῖ- syllable rises and falls, while the following -ό- rises. At least, that’s the conventional dogma. In my experience very few people can do it at all convincingly, and how could we relate to it anyway? I think stressing accented syllables makes for a decent approximation (stress is normally accompanied by a rise in pitch), provided that the quantitative distinction between long and short vowels is respected, as it too often is not.

Sidney Allen was the expert. See his Vox Graeca (in English!) and his Accent and Rhythm.

Usually we use stress accent like we would in Latin, no? IIRC we are not even fully sure how the pitch accent exactly worked, but that’s what I read briefly here on Textkit, so maybe the guy saying it was wrong.
About vowel lenght, isn’t it also generally ignored? From the bit I read of Benjamin Kantor’s A Short Guide to the Pronunciation of New Testament Greek (is this guy well respected? His research seems to be very serious and his books seem to be the go-to about Greek pronunciation around the time the NT was written), it seems to have eroded in common speech by the first centuries of our era (and so the pitch accent, or so he says). Is it really that important? I’ve seem some people claim its essential for Latin and Greek, but if people (seemingly) ignored it outside poetry for many centuries and still studied and understood and enjoyed those works — Eustathius, for example, wrote big commentaries on Homer that seem to be very good (but that’s what I heard, I haven’t read them myself…), and probably pronounced Greek almost as it is pronounced today, if the iotacism and loss of aspirations and lenght really were completed by his time —, should it really be called essential? Good, sure, but essential?

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy answer and for it being mostly my own thoughts instead of my questions. And thanks for being so diligent to answer me (most answers I’ve been getting are from you); they are of big help!

-John

Yes, our textbooks are mostly geared to classical Greek, but by New Testament times the pronunciation of everyday speech has undergone significant leveling, and the quantitative distinctions are in gradual process of breaking down. This is amply attested in contemporary papyrus documents from Egypt, and Kantor has published similar findings for Palestine, where there’s not so much direct evidence.

Still, however widespread such leveling became in the speech of the general population, educated people continued to read the older literature and to respect the quantitative distinctions which after all are built into the language. Eustathius’ gigantic scholarly commentaries on the Homeric epics are written in language that maintains the grammatical standards of classical Greek.

I see…
Much thanks again!

Would then the pitch accent thing and the vowel length be applicable to the Modern Greek pronunciation when reading poetry? I prefer to pronounce it that way because it is easier for me.

No, modern Greek is based on stress, not pitch, and the ancient binary distinction between long and short vowels (and between heavy and light syllables) no longer applies.

Just to follow up on this example, which is a bit interesting. The original question was how to pronounce Ἀθηναῖός ἐστιν, if not using pitch accent, but rather stress accent. It can’t really be done using stress accent, and it is for that reason that in Modern Greek, you can only have the additional accent on the last syllable if the word is originally accented on the antepenult. An example would be πρόεδρός μας. Α practical work-around in this case would be, I think, to place (when speaking) the stress accent on ός and to not place an accent on ναῖ. The second accent dominates anyway, and this would agree with your Portuguese example of cafezinho, in which the zi is the primary accent.

In that πρόεδρός case both accents would sound (so PRO-e-DROS), then?

Yes, in that example from Modern Greek, both would be accented, but the second would be the primary accent.

Something to consider is that a language having a “stress accent” doesn’t mean that it is devoid of pitch inflection, which often corresponds with the stress accent.

As someone who has listened to more than 300 hours of modern speakers speak Ancient Greek I can testify that NONE of them use pitch with consistency. Early on Toledo experimented with using pitch and I’ve heard him do it in videos where the speech was prepared but in his later videos where he is speaking off the cuff he will not use pitch (see for example his video on τριδος trivium where he talks about Euclid). Ranieri very rarely used pitch in some of his audios but most of the time he does not. Out of the other roughly 15 modern speakers that I’ve heard speak maybe more than 1 hour of Ancient Greek, other than the 2 previously mentioned, I’ve heard none of them use pitch. I myself early on tried to use pitch but found it too difficult. Moreover, when I decided that the best way to speak Ancient Greek was to use the pronunciation system adopted by more than 85% of the speakers, which is to say that scheme adopted by the Polis Institute, I officially abandoned all attempts at a pitch accent.

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The way I typically handle the double accent issue while trying to read aloud or speak in a natural-feeling sort of way with a pitch accent is to use relative pitch. So for your example, “Δικαιόπολις Άθηναῖός ἐστιν”, what that means is that the acute accent gets pitched “up”, the syllable following it gets pitched “down”, then the circumflex is an “up” followed by a “down”, the second accent in “Ἀθηναῖός” stays at the same pitch as the end of the circumflex, and then the vowel that follows that acute accent (the ἐ in ἐστιν") is spoken at a lower pitch than the previous vowel.

Now I am no scholar of linguistics so take everything I say here with an appropriate grain of salt. That said, I am a singer and a native English speaker, so I use what I have available to me in my linguistic toolbox to try to make things work.

While English doesn’t have a pitch accent per se, English does regularly use both stress and pitch to convey meaning. Notice, for instance, that in English the italicized word above would be pronounced with stress and the bolded word would be pronounced both with stress and a rise in pitch, with the following word being spoken at a lower pitch. The last syllable of the sentence would be spoken at a lower pitch relative to the preceding syllable in order to indicate that the sentence was declarative. If I used an upward pitch instead, it would indicate an interrogative: “English does regularly use both stress and pitch to convey meaning?” Notice also that if you want to read that sentence out loud in a natural sounding way that your pitch and stress throughout the sentence is entirely different in the interrogative versus declarative mode.

This is very useful, because it gives us a place where you can begin to get a feel for using pitch to convey meaning in a natural way. You already do it, after all, even if you’re not aware of it. And primarily the means by which you do it is by using pitches relative to each other, not ones that are strictly defined in some rigid way.

Pitch is perceived primarily in how it relates to other tones that occur near to it in time. If I sing a C4, and only a C4, it doesn’t really do much. If I sing a C4 and then move up or down a little bit, then all of a sudden that note becomes something meaningful: it can be a fifth, a third, it can be an octave, it can be all kinds of other things. You will perceive the C4 as either “high” or “low” based on what I do either before or after it. I like to use that in the pitch accent by taking what would be really unnatural-feeling constructions like “Ἀθηναῖός ἐστιν” if all the accents were actual “tones” and instead using the mechanics of relative pitch to create the same sort of perceptual experience. In this case, starting from a neutral pitch, you get

-Ἀθ- -η- / ναῖ \ -ός- ἐστιν
Hopefully my formatting makes sense there. Dashes represent neutral pitch, the slashes indicate rising or falling pitch, and the subscript indicates the lower pitch. Essentially what I’m saying is that the second accent in that word can be “ignored”, but should result in the following word being pitched lower than the accented syllable. This causes the listener to perceive the accented “ός” as being pitched “up”, even though the speaker actually hasn’t done so. IMO this successfully conveys the meaning in a much more natural sounding and feeling way that functions quite a lot more like how English “pitch” conveys meaning, which makes it much easier to adapt and use.

I am certainly no expert, but just to make a humble suggestion: Since the following word ἐστιν is enclitic, and indeed ἐστιν is the very reason that Ἀθηναῖός even has two accents, we should pronounce this either as one giant word: (Ἀθηναῖόσἐστιν) or as two words separated differently: (Ἀθηναῖ όσἐστιν)

Trying to pronounce Ἀθηναῖός all by itself with stress accent seems weird, but pronouncing Ἀθηναῖ όσἐστιν is somewhat less weird.

Examples of English phrases with two words, three syllables each, first with accent on ultima, second with accent on antepenult:

Tennessee elephant

Japanese animal

oversee ambulances

referee energy