Χαίρετε!
A few days ago I posted asking about accents. I’ve then been reading a tiny bit about Greek pronunciation, and I have came to the conclusion that conserving vowel length is a convenient thing to do: it’ll make me able to read poetry more easily (if I get used to doing it right reading prose, I shall do it right when reading poetry too) and make me less prone to orthography errors (I’ve been considering adopting consonant values close of those of modern Greek and vowels closer to more archaic values, more or less as Luke Ranieri proposes with his “Lucian Pronunciation”). The thing is: how am I supposed to make vowel length properly? My mother tongue is Portuguese; our language normally makes stressed vowels longer, which apparently isn’t the case in Greek. How should the accent work if the accented syllable is shorter than the other syllables in the same word? I also can’t get that “pitch accent” thing (I know I asked it just last week, but I still didn’t get it…); I don’t know a thing about music (very shamefully: my father is a musician), so it confuses me a lot. As far as I searched, we are not even fully sure about how it really worked (I read that here, which seems to be regarded as a good resource); is it really that important? Couldn’t I just do vowel length and normal stress, as (I suppose) those folks who maintain vowel length in Latin do? Also, IIRC a vowel followed by two consonants is long in Greek just as it is (or should be) in Latin; if this is true, would it also be the case if the vowel in question is ε or ο (as in ἕλκουσι, they pull)?
Maybe with more diligent research I could get an answer myself, but I have the fear that I’ll end up using more time than I would by just reading the answers here, and time is precious; sorry for that, then. If you can, please let me know the sources of what you’re saying; it may help me with future studies. Sorry for being slow to understand these things, please be patient with me.
I would recommend two sources for basic pronunciation of Attic Greek:
W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca, 3rd edition, 1987
Donald J. Mastronarde, Introduction to Attic Greek, 2nd edition, 2013, chapters 1 and 2.
Long vowels are held longer than short vowels. This has nothing to do with the slightly lengthened stressed vowels in Portuguese, as you note. You hold the vowel without changing the position of the tongue.
A vowel followed by two consonants does not have its length changed. The syllable becomes heavy, but this has nothing to do with the vowel length, which is invariant. See chapter 2 of Mastronarde.
As a first step I would recommend concentrating on vowel length in the syllable with no accent - just a sequence of monotone syllables. Once that is done, you could then consider putting a slight stress on the accented syllable. Don’t overdo it - make it very slight. If you want to get into pitch accent you would then change the stress accent to pitch accent, but, again, make it very slight. You don’t have to sing.
That stress would be pronouncing that particular syllable slightly louder without making it longer, right? So in ἄνθρωπος, that ἄν should be slightly louder than θρω and πος, but that O sound in θρω should be hold longer than the same sound in πος and the A sound in ἄν, as it is a long vowel?
Hungarian has distinctive vowel quantity, but not tonal accents. Here’s an example of Hungarian speech.
Navajo has both distinctive vowel quantity and tonal accent. An example of Navajo speech:
I don’t speak either of these languages, and I have no idea what these speakers are saying. As a non-speaker, I find it very difficult to distinguish long from short vowels in either of these clips. I think the difference is very subtle, much more subtle than some of the exaggerated attempts to replicate ancient Greek speech I’ve heard, and maybe in part consists of very slight differences in vowel quality that cue those who speak these languages fluently to the quantitative distinctions.
It would take a lot of time and effort, I think, to learn to hear and reproduce the distinctions in a natural way without exaggeration. Really, you would need to be trained by a native speaker. All we can do is try as best we can, but we should be aware of our limitations.
Hi John,
My advice would be try reading iambic trimeters aloud. Iambics work basically as an alternation of light and heavy syllables, with the heavy syllables often (not always) coinciding with long vowels.
Take any Greek tragedy and read the first ten or twenty lines, trying to get the alternating rhythm into your head.
ἥκω Διὸς παῖς τήνδε Θηβαίαν χθόνα (“I am come, Zeus’s son, to this Theban land”)
etc.
I’ve bolded the metrically significant long vowels in this verse.
Until you get the hang of it and get the iambic rhythm fixed in your head you may find it helpful to stress every other syllable.
In English, you can hear the vowel-length pattern, shortlong in blackbird (with the short stressed). You can hear the shortlong pattern in black bird (with the long stressed).
Audio of the second batch. I’ve made ὄν into ὅν for the recording, which looks like a typo.
In the first line of the above Διός and χθόνα heavy, but not lengthened. As is ὅν τικτει, and others following. A little bit more loudness in pronunciation, or more precise enunciation of the syllable seem to work for me, or both.
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Everybody should be able to contribute audio. This is the magic button:
The distinction is between vowels, which are either long or short, and syllables, which are either heavy or light. (Heavy syllables used to be called long, and light ones short, but that terminology leads to confusion between syllables and vowels.) Light syllables have short vowels.
You shouldn’t need to make syllables “stronger.”
ἥκω has two long vowels (η and ω), two heavy syllables (ἥ and κω). Διὸς παῖς has two short vowels and one long one (actually a diphthong, αι). All this is built into the language.
Then there’s meter. The iambic trimeter consists of three iambic metra. An iambic metron has four parts:
a syllable that may be either light or heavy—it’s known as “anceps”—, followed by
a heavy syllable, followed by
a light syllable, followed by
a heavy syllable.
So the pattern is basically light and heavy syllables in alternation, except that the first syllable of each metron is free to be heavy instead of light.
(Occasionally a pair of light syllables will substitute for a heavy one, as in the proper names Διόνυσος and Σεμέλη at the beginning of verses 2 & 3. But this doesn’t seriously disrupt the basic iambic rhythm.)
And an important structural feature is the caesura. Iambic trimeters tend to have word-end after the anceps of the second metron (e.g. after ἥκω Διὸς παῖς in 1, or after μορφὴν δ’ ἀμείψας in 4); failing that, after the next light syllable (as in 2 Διόνυσος ὃν τίκτει ποθ’). So a trimeter usually falls into two unequal lengths. Very few trimeters break at the halfway point.
But how are heavy syllables sounded different from light syllables? A heavy syllable may have a short vowel, I comprehend (could a light syllable have a long vowel too, then?), but how would a heavy syllable sound different from a light syllable?
Heavy syllables take a bit longer than light syllables, in phonological principle—they occupy more sound-space. And remember, it’s a binary system: any given syllable is either heavy or light. In Διὸς παῖς, for example, the -ος is a heavy syllable because another consonant follows. Similarly with μορφὴν: μορ- is a heavy syllable because another consonant follows. It seems rather artificial, but that’s the way it works. And the dividing line between heavy and light is not always cut-and-dried; certain consonant combinations—a plosive followed by a liquid—may function as single consonants. With τέκνον, for instance, the first syllable is sometimes heavy, sometimes light—it can be whichever the meter requires.
But you don’t have to work out each syllable individually, and you don’t have to think about making heavy syllables sound heavy. Heavy syllables are inherently heavy, they’re heavy simply by virtue of their composition. And an iambic trimeter will always fit the scheme of the iambic trimeter.
So the “heavy syllables” should sound longer just by pronouncing them naturally? I have not to do anything more, as I would do to make a vowel or a consonant long?
Yes that’s right, you don’t need to do anything to make heavy syllables sound heavy, they are naturally heavy and naturally sound heavy. (We may not always be able to tell, but they could.)
And with consonants you simply follow the spelling. With vowels the only complicating factor is that except for ο/ω and ε/η the alphabet does not itself distinguish between long and short, so we have to do the job ourselves. Similarly with all the vowels in Latin.
Ok, I think I finally understood it! Just two more questions (I promise these are the last!):
To correctly observe vowel quantity, I ought to simple pronounce the long vowels for a slightly longer time (not exaggerating it), and not make the accented syllable long just because it is accented (so I shouldn’t make the α in ἄνθρωπος long just because it is accented).
Is poetry based on syllable or vowel length? Those patterns (long-short-short, long-long, long-short…) refer to long and short vowels or to heavy and light syllables?
Yes, but you can make long vowels considerably longer than short ones if you like, I really don’t care. But you should never make the α of ἄνθρωπος long, because it’s short. Accent does not affect length (except inasmuch as a circumflex is used only with long vowels).
Verse—and prose, for that matter—is based on syllable length (or weight, rather), and syllable weight is based on vowel length together with the consonantal environment. (“Long-short-short” might refer to a dactyl; properly it’s syllables that are so designated, not vowels.)
You may well have further questions. Don’t hesitate to ask.
Much, much, MUCH thanks for all the help! Now I can finally pronounce Greek and Latin words properly (well, now I have to practice and learn the quantities of all the words whose lengths I ignored, hehehe)!!!
