The two links, unless I have misread them, relate to pupils learning to read in their native language. They are people who know the language very well but not how to read. This is a very different thing to L2 learners who do not know know the target language. So different in fact that I’m not sure how transferable research in teaching L1 reading is transferable to L2 learners like us. The second link is not research - it is a teacher trying to encourage a technique they think works. Teachers always think their methods work. They are very subject to confirmation bias. Hence both Christophe Rico and Stephanie Russel (whose teaching method is so grammar based that I would think it a parody of the method if I did not have a copy of her book) believe their method to be the best.
Many people learn living languages do it with the aim first of all to read that language. German for example is a very valuable to anyone who wishes to be taken seriously as a classics scholar. If research demonstrated that learning German as a living language helped_reading_ fluency would you exclude them from relevance to learning how to read Ancient Greek?
concerning the making sentence and aural approach, is it allright to use modern Greek pronounciation?
because I got this habit of mine tend to use that. even still far from perfect
or should I switch to other?
The problem of modern Greek pronunciation is that it does not have the same phoneme mapping as the ancient written language which is based on Attic pronunciation (or possibly even earlier?). Hence τειχος will sound like τοιχος. For this reason Rico chose Attic pronunciation for his course even though the variant of Ancient Greek he teaches is later. The aim is to after all to read Ancient Greek so it is important that our speaking and listening is as good as possible representation of what we find in the texts.
Having said that if you do not make such confusions and you are only reading aloud to yourself you might consider it not worth the effort to change your pronunciation. If you intend to record and publish your readings, however, I would encourage you to go for a pronunciation like reconstructed Attic or Erasmian that does allow such distinctions to be heard.
@ariphron. Thanks for sharing your experience. As I’ve said before, I think your recordings are most impressive.
@calvinist. I appreciate your response to an overhasty post. Agreed on language. I’m not against aural fluency, I just don’t prioritize it. Means of acquiring it are lacking (ariphron notwithstanding), and I find texts are more readily and more accurately understood by eye than by ear in any case (a reader unlike a listener looks ahead and takes in local context and controls the pace, and doesn’t have delivery and pronunciation problems to contend with).
@daivid. Not if it were possible to learn ancient Greek as a living language, but I don’t believe it is.
@sophronios. daivid said it.
Apologies all round for the brevity. I have to scale back my participation here.
@Sofronios
I mostly agree with daivid about pronunciation. For native modern Greek speakers I understand why they use the modern pronunciation since it feels natural to them and is hard to pronounce words that haven’t changed in spelling in a different way than they do when reading modern Greek. It’d be the same thing if I tried to read the King James Bible in a restored English accent, it would be awkward. So, I’m not totally against the modern pronunciation. But, for those of us who don’t have the impediment of being native modern Greek speakers, I think it is more practical to use a restored pronunciation because it allows the structure of the language to be heard, quite literally. There are basically 3 ways to pronounce Ancient Greek that are currently used, and the biggest difference is in the pronunciation of the vowels and diphthongs:
I use the Restored Koine, which is in the middle, it brings in some ambiguity, but not nearly as much as the Modern pronunciation. Pick one you like and just stick with it, but I would say avoid the Modern pronunciation unless you speak Modern Greek and it’s very hard to change the pronunciation.
@daivid
I think I’ve seen some research before on the effects of re-reading for learning a foreign language, but I can’t remember where. Anyway, children learning to read even in their own language will come across syntax and vocabulary that isn’t used in everyday colloquial language. “Book language”, especially on academic subjects can be quite different from the everyday register.
The current version of the table describing my pronunciation system has 38 vowel and diphthong allophones. It isn’t clear how many vowel phonemes they represent, maybe 10-15 including long and short.
That’s not even to mention single-syllable vowel combinations created through Synezesis, nor their behavior under more general vowel-vowel juncture.
It’s surprising that the early Greeks were able to maintain so many graphically distinct vowels – likely phonetically distinct – it was probably only possible because of the vowel length and pitch accent.
I oversimplified the “Restored Attic” system in order to make the similarities/differences more apparent. But yes, vowel length would mean that there are actually two alphas, two iotas, and two upsilons. The reason I didn’t think that was important to mention is that many people ignore vowel length (not all) even though they generally follow the Restored system. They usually mark the difference between the pairs ε/η and ο/ω by vowel quality, not quantity.
I don’t think Homer should sound like song. I do think it should sound like verse. But Greeks can read it however they like, of course. My point was simply that verse depends on meter, and meter depends on quantity.
Song as in melodious sound? You think the poems were recited rather than performed to some accompanying device?
I imagine we could argue the point but it’s not worthy the effort here. As to “quantity” I am curious about that concept. Perhaps I have spent too much time both hearing and attempting Byzantine chant (Koine) in church and being constantly corrected by monks trained on Mt Athos - correcting modern schemes, by the way, to something neither modern nor Erasmusian.
Also, I do think pitch matters a lot (even allowing that such chant is heavily influenced by Arabic).
I’ll have to practice some Homer in chant style and see what comes out.
It’s a long time since we were on topic here, so let’s not worry about that!
Performance. It’s only a presumption, but seems likely enough, that “Homer” performed his poems to his own accompaniment on the lyre, much as the αοιδοι in his poems are described as doing. The sound will presumably have been melodious, yes, at least to his listeners’ ears (probably not to ours), but it was not μελωδια in any technical sense, and the accents seem to have been irrelevant to the versification (which is not to say they were not rendered; presumably they were, to some extent). The lyre accompaniment was soon abandoned (Hesiod and Homeric rhapsodes held a staff), and at least from that point on it would be better to speak of recitation than of song. All epic poets, Greek and Latin alike, describe their activity as “singing,” but that doesn’t mean they actually sang; singing was always accompanied by musical accompaniment. Whether they did or not (and most of them certainly didn’t), it was the meter that was all-important, and that’s a matter of quantity.
So, quantity. Ancient Greek verse operates with a binary distinction between long and short vowels. That’s fundamental to the prosodic system of the language. In verse, that goes along with a binary distinction between long (or “heavy”) syllables and short (or “light”) ones. Hence the metrical symbols ‒ and ⏑. All vowels were perceived as one or the other, and so were all syllables. The time relationship was thought of as 2:1. The distinction between long and short vowels (let alone syllables) was eroded over time, as you well know, but it’s fundamental to all ancient Greek verse, and was retained by the literary elite (both pagan and Christian) down to the 5th century and beyond, at least in verse.
Byzantine chant, as I understand it, is based on a tonal musical system with nothing in common with the principles of ancient versification. Musically it is possible to postulate some sort of continuity with the αρμονιαι and τονοι of ancient Greek music, however speculatively, but of course other cultural influences are dominant, and liturgical chant itself is entirely different from any conceivable performance styles of verse in antiquity.
Still, I imagine it would be fun to set Homer to Byzantine chant!
What mwh said above. I concur. I don’t distinguish vowel length in my pronunciation of Greek or Latin, but in the rare instances when I read verse I attend to the long vowels. The exact pronunciation isn’t as important as the fact that the meter is made apparent. Also, I think the argument that Ancient Greek (and Latin) poetry is not based on a distinction between heavy/light syllables (which implies long/short vowels) is a non-starter. It’s embedded in the text; every verse shows a conscious design on the part of the author to put words together according to a pattern based upon syllable weight, not accent.
I do not disagree. I do think the vowel length vs. syllable length to be a non-distinction. One cannot have either without the other…or rather, to my ear they are the same thing.
Accent I do not address, but I do think pitch affected vowel/syllable length. I too often hear that we do not know how pitch sounded. Frankly, we do. But one would need to spend time listening to live modern Greek conversation (not Internet TV) or even Hindi (the sound of which I love in that it reminds me of how Greek is spoken, pitch laden. Other oriental languages are similar.) Strangely it is from female modern Greek speakers that I hear more pitch employed, much less so from men.
My preferred method would be to read lots of easy Greek that repeated examples of specific paradigms but seeing as there is a dearth of these what I am actually doing is to set my computer to quiz myself on the forms and it repeats those forms proportionately to how often I get them right or wrong.
What I use to do this is mysql database along with a php web interface. However, there are several software programs available that do the same thing.
But it only works because I do it every day. Further, I am convinced that that the only real way to learn the forms is to read them repeatedly in context. Hence if you have limited time it would be best to use it reading. I am happy to use some of my time doing this because I have enough time to read as well quiz myself in this way. And my hope is that if more of the forms become second nature my reading speed will increase.
thx u ppl for all the inputs and arguments.. precious!
have been sticking to this declensions, and hey its not that hard..
now I can reproduce all the 8 subtypes of JACT from memory… next I think I’ll go for mastronade for enrichment(I hope enrichment is a right word) and keep the inductive and aural methods alive..
its hard and foreign but I think this rustic mind here can cope somehow
Five unrounded vowels [ɑ æ ɛ e i] and five rounded vowels [ɔ o u ø y], in short and long variants, followed by [w] or [j] or no glide, and nasalized or not. That makes 10x2x3x2=120 possibilities, or 80 if you exclude nasalized diphthongs (which I suspect only occurred in cases where a nasal consonant is actually written). Of course, not every one of these occurred in the language, but of the 60 vowels and diphthongs not counting nasalized ones in this system, only a few are similar enough that it’s unlikely for a language to have both, distinguished phonemically: the main examples would be [i:/ij/i:j],[ej/ɛj],[u:/uw/u:w],[ɔw/ow]. Some versions of reconstructed Attic do not have æ or ø; if you exclude them you get 8x6=48, maybe 40 usable. The sixteen graphically distinct forms (21 with macrons) do not really make a huge fraction of the likely vowel sounds available, and it should not be surprising if one graph represented several vowel phonemes. Excluding nasalized vowels and separate allophones occurring before vowels and consonants, I use about 30 of the 50-some possibilities, or roughly two per written sign.
For me the benefit of going to ~30 vowels and diphthongs compared to simpler systems that have 10-20 is slight. Some words inflect more regularly, and the connection between different words with the same roots can be a little clearer. Most of all, using so many different vowels can make the Attic contraction rules feel intuitive rather than something rather arbitrary that you have to learn. But a listener who knows the language well would not have his listening comprehension reduced to a significant degree on listening to a much simpler system such as Buth Koine. On the other hand, I find that nasalized vowels make a big difference. I started using them in a conservative way when I made my recording of Odyssey Book 6; since then I have been trying to nasalize all α’s that are reflexes of IE syllabic [ṃ/ṇ], plus all vowels that appear before /s/ < /ns/. This makes a big improvement in comprehensibility, especially when I hear words that I do not know well, because it makes many morphological features more regular and more distinctive to the ear than to the eye. For instance: alpha-privative, nasalized [ã], is clearly distinguished from alpha-copulative. Common-gender singular accusatives are reliably marked by a nasal ending, /-n/ or /-ã/; plural accusatives by /-ns/. Active participles have /-nt-/ or /-ns-/.
Now there are two obvious questions about this. First, how can we know if there actually were so many nasalized vowels in any particular dialect, namely Attic at the beginning of the fourth century B.C.? Second, if they had all these nasalized vowels that clearly represent an allophone of /n/, why didn’t they write it as such? To get the second question out of the way, I would say that the concept of a morphophonemic writing system was slow in developing. Early attempts at using an alphabet to write Greek were more of the nature of an approximate phonetic transcription. Each letter indicated a certain sound, and people wrote down speech by writing the letters that came closest to representing the sound that they spoke. With respect to N, what you see in ancient inscriptions is that people avoided writing it except in places where they actually touched the tip of the tongue to the roof of their mouth and made the [n] sound.
For the historical development of nasal vowels, almost certainly they were present where I pronounce them at an early stage of the language, but most likely some of them dropped out, one by one, as people found that they could communicate fine without making the extra effort to observe this rather subtle distinction. It would also be natural for nasalized vowels to be avoided in singing. Then, of course, in Hellenistic times and later when more people learned Greek as a foreign language with the aid of writing, if the nasal vowel distinction was not taught, students did not learn it. Thus we can be almost certain that the nasal vowels had disappeared from educated speech before Byzantine times, and it is essentially unknowable how much they appeared in ordinary Athenian speech in the target classical times. As a result, an evidence-based approach to reconstruction such as that in Vox Graeca will tend to recommend against nasalizing any of these vowels, as the simplest rule to learn and with no particular evidence against it, whereas I nasalize all, because I think it’s the most helpful rule for listeners and it’s consistent with what’s known.
So to get back on topic, I learn 3rd declension nouns by finding a way to pronounce them so that they sound regular, even if they don’t look regular on the page.
@daivid
What is the form of the quiz stimulus and response that you settled on for reviewing noun forms? Last year, Joel and I had threads on Anki deck generators for both nouns and verbs, and we found that how the information was presented was a very personal choice: how to handle macrons, what extra information to include on the back of cards, etc. I don’t know if Joel still uses his Anki deck; I’ve gotten mine out a couple times in the last month.
