Learning vowel length: Textbooks, lexicons, & vocab lists with macrons

Greek Learning Greek
1

Hello everyone,

I’m trying to compensate for never having paid attention to vowel lengths before, with the desire to learn them now so that I can properly read Greek poetry in good meter. And in general, I’m working on shifting my pronunciation to Ranieri’s Lucian pronunciation for all classical and Koine texts, which helps distinguish grammatical features and spelling much better than the Modern Greek pronunciation I’ve used for years. Plus I just like the melodic sound of incorporating both vowel length and pitch, especially since we bother to go to all the trouble of learning which diacritics go where.

So I’m looking for good vocabulary resources that mark the long vowel lengths for ᾱ, ῑ, & ῡ, the “hidden” long vowels that aren’t obvious just from looking at a word in a normal text. Hoping for suggestions of textbooks, vocabulary lists (e.g. Anki decks, or physical flash cards, etc), and recommended dictionaries/lexicons that would be most helpful in this regard.

Here are the books I’m aware of that print macrons like this:

Hansen and Quinn - An Intensive Greek Course
Athenaze (both American and Italian editions, I believe?)
Liddel Scott Dictionaries-- physical copies, not digital
Blackie - First Greek Course (old public domain text on Archive.org)

Anyone want to suggest other valuable resources for marked vowel lengths?

Would really love to know if someone has an Anki deck or some form of 1000-2000 most essential words WITH macrons printed, as a way to learn a core vocabulary.

The other big frustration is that I can’t seem to find a way to type macrons PLUS other necessary diacritical marks on the same vowel with Keyman. So I can’t create my own vocab cards on Anki with this feature. Has anyone figured out how to get over this hurdle?

2

A website put up by Donald Mastronarde to support his book Introduction to Attic Greek:
http://atticgreek.org/pronunc/pronunc_guide.html

3

What OS are you on ?

On Mac or Windows, Tyndale House keyboard will do it and it renders ok with their Cardo font. Get’s a bit cramped at small font sizes. The standard Greek poly keyboard won’t do it. It permits a macron over an ι but elsewhere it ends up beside not over the vowel.

On Windows I also have the Society of Classical Studies keyboard. That can also combine diacritics with macrons. It’s a pay for keyboard if you are not a member - $20 if I recall correctly.

Thx
D

4

Hi, the best way to learn the quantities isn’t through textbooks, lexicons or vocab lists. It’s instead through reading and hearing poetry itself. Here’s what I’d suggest:

  1. Ingest as much of the Iliad as you can. It needs to seep into your bones. Perhaps start by going to this site:

http://hypotactic.com/homer/iliad1.html

In the top bar, tick all the boxes (audio, continuous, colours, scansion, feet, caesura), click the first word, and start taking it in, many times over. Don’t move to step 2 until you can recite from memory a fair chunk of the opening.

  1. Now you can start picking apart what you have absorbed sub-consciously. There are different aspects you need to learn: first, the quantities in the declension/conjugation terminations. You can get these from any book on metre or accents, e.g. I’ve summarised some key rules on pg. 40 here:

http://aoidoi.org/articles/GrkIambicComp-23-Apr-06.pdf

Next, you need to learn the quantities in the stems and the other parts and elements of speech (prepositions, conjunctions, particles, prefixes, etc.). This comes mainly through reading poetry (see e.g. Smyth s 147 who advocates the same approach). Keep up listening to Homer and then branch out to other forms of scanned poetry. There’s lots online, e.g. on pages 58 and ff. of the iambic doc linked above, I scanned the start of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. There’s a recording of this (made for the Raeburn and Thomas edition). You could really start anywhere however, there’s quite a lot.

  1. At some point you’ll become confused about a syllable not scanning “as it ought”, and then you’ll need to learn about the peculiarities of each type of metre, dialect etc. You’ll start collecting strange and exotic specimens of words such as correption, synecphonesis, resolution, elision and prodelision, crasis… underneath all this is a core rhythm for each type of poetry which is the main thing to absorb, and your knowledge of quantities will come along by itself.

You’ll also see that some words don’t scan the same in Homer as they do in Attic, some words don’t even scan the same in different verses of Homer. All of this you can learn best by reading lots of poetry. There’s often a description of metrical peculiarities at the end of the LSJ entry, e.g. see the end of the καλός entry:

https://logeion.uchicago.edu/καλός

It’s not just in Homer vs. Attic: it goes across different different types of metre and dialect, e.g. interesting things happen in Aeolic: see pages 8 and ff. of my notes on writing Aeolic verse here:

http://aoidoi.org/articles/writingsapphics.pdf

And so it goes on. Whichever poet you’re reading, if you pick up a decent edition, the introduction should cover this well.

One last thing: until recently people talked about long and short syllables, as well as long and short vowels. There’s a bit of a trend of separating these concepts and talking about a syllable’s weight (light or heavy, which translates to short or long in the old terminology): it helps beginners see that short vowels don’t change their quality or quantity by being jammed into a closed syllable. It’s just a nuance of terminology however: the old books cover metre just as well, even if they use different names for this.

Cheers, Chad

5

Hi Chad,

You mention the recording for the Raeburn and Thomas Agamemnon. Do you happen to know if it’s still available anywhere? It seems to have disappeared into thin air.

Mark

6

Hi Mark, you need to order the CDs directly (it’s like the 2 must-have DVDs for the Cambridge Latin Course—at least when I got them, you needed to go directly to Cambridge).

The email addresses to contact still seem to be listed on the OUP page for the commentary in the “Description” section, so hopefully they still work (it was around a decade ago that I ordered):

A recording of the full text ofThe Agamemnon in Ancient Greek, for use in conjunction with the commentary, has been produced under the direction of David Raeburn. It is available on two CDs, together with explanatory notes, priced £9.99 plus postage from Blackwell’s Bookshop (> classics@blackwell.co.uk> ) and The Hellenic Bookservice (> monica@hellenicbookservice.com> ).

https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/the-agamemnon-of-aeschylus-9780199595617?cc=gb&lang=en&

PS we had a discussion about these recordings here a while back:

http://discourse.textkit.com/t/rhythm-of-the-chorus-e-g-agamemnon/11262/1

Cheers, Chad

7

Chad’s notes are mindblowingly thorough. I got a kick out of his alchemization of Aristotle (of all people) into tragic iambics! I’ll add just one small thing. In some words vowel length cannot be metrically determined. Reading aloud (or vocalizing silently) is better at revealing the quantity (aka weight) of syllables than the quantity of vowels. Also worth bearing in mind (as Chad well knows): poets were free to have the anceps syllable (notated x in the abstract metrical scheme) occupied by either a short or a long, at will. (The dactylic hexameter has no use for the anceps, but iambics and trochaics and aeolic verses most definitely do.) But remember the entire system is a binary one: all syllables are either light(short) or heavy(long), and what matters for metrical purposes is not the quantity of the vowels but the weight of the syllables. So the distinction between vowels and syllables is absolutely fundamental. Heavy syllables often contain short vowels, e.g. in the Iliad the first syllable of ἄλγεα or the alpha of προΐαψεν, but meter will not tell you that and as far as the scansion goes it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t worry much about such inessentials. Just get the basic rhythm into your head and the rest will follow well enough.

Chad doesn’t concern himself with pitch, and nor do I (but see katalogon’s thread on it). It’s a whole other ballgame.

8

Hi Michael, agreed on all the above. On the anceps point, just a few additional thoughts, for those less familiar with this:

Scanning Homer is quite easy to do as fast as you can read, when you get the hang of it, because you only in fact need to scan 5 syllables in any verse (the second syllable in the first 5 feet). Once you know these, you can scan the whole verse. E.g. you only need to scan these syllables in red to read off the quantities of Iliad 1.1:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

When it comes to many other verse types however, it’s not always as easy. In iambic trimeter, a very common pattern is a line made up of these two parts:

  • First, a slower tumm tumm ta tumm tumm (heavy, heavy, light, heavy, heavy)


  • Second, a skipping tumm ta tumm ta tumm ta tumm (heavy, light, heavy, light, heavy, light, heavy).

A classic example of this core rhythm is the first verse of Sophocles’ OT:

  • First, the slower ὦ τέκνα, Κάδμου (tumm tumm ta tumm tumm)


  • Second, the skipping τοῦ πάλαι νέα τροφή (tumm ta tumm ta tumm ta tumm)

However there are several ways that this common rhythm can change. One of them is by changing the syllable quantities in three places (each an “anceps”):

  • the (1) start and the (2) end of the first part (changing tumm to ta: this happens in about a third of all iambic trimeters in Aeschylus and Sophocles), and


  • the (3) middle of the second part (changing ta to tumm: this happens in slightly less than half of all iambic trimeters in Aeschylus and Sophocles).

I’ve calculated the statistics on page 53 of my iambic notes above.

So at those three places (describing it another way, positions 1, 5 and 9 in the 12 positions of an iambic trimeter, which are each an anceps position), you need to check whether the syllable is light or heavy. Another way to visualise these three positions is in the more traditional schema (I’ve underlined the three ancipita positions; don’t worry about the final one for now):

x - u - | x - u - | x - u x

In the Sophocles OT v. 1 example above, there’s no difficulty: you can just read off straight away the quantities:

  • In the first part, the first and last syllables in ὦ τέκνα, Κάδμου are both clearly heavy (with a long vowel ὦ and a diphthong in -μου).


  • In the second part, the middle syllable is clearly light (with a short vowel in the open syllable νέ-).

In other cases, however, it’s not so easy: you need to check whether an open syllable containing α, ι or υ at positions 1, 5 or 9 is heavy or light. I’ve shown in my scansion of Agamemnon from pgs 58 and ff. of my iambic notes how to do this (see the red quotes underneath the text on the left-hand side). E.g. in v. 1:

θεοὺς μὲν αἰτῶ τῶνδ᾽ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων

you can’t tell from the metre whether the open syllable -λα- at position 9 is heavy or light. The way to figure this out is to find the syllable in another verse at a position other than 1, 5 or 9. You can see in the red text below v. 1 that I’ve quoted Prometheus Bound v. 754 for this, showing the same syllable in position 11 (and so it must be light):

αὕτη γὰρ ἦν ἂν πημάτων ἀπαλλαγή

You can use the dictionary for this, but I think it’s more reliable to always try to check the word (or its cognates) yourself in other verses to work out the quantities when in doubt.

Cheers, Chad

9

Hi Chad, You are more methodical than me, and more analytical. Confronted with θεοὺς μὲν αἰτῶ τῶνδ᾽ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων (iambic trimeter), if I didn’t already know I would just assume that ἀπαλλαγὴν was short because that’s the way it looks and there are plenty of other -αλλάττω derivatives to confirm it, not to mention many others such as φυλάσσω etc., all with short alpha (e.g. φύλακες). And it would be surprising if -λαγ- was ever long except in Doric. Or I could simply look it up, rather than go searching for the same word elsewhere in a different position where the alpha had to be short. That’s if I even cared to find out whether it was short or long—it would scan perfectly well either way.

For reading Homer I recommend simply heading for the caesura, with the hexameter rhythm firmly fixed in one’s head. It works well in a classroom.

We have different approaches, that’s all. It comes to the same thing in the end. And we agree reading is all-important.

10

Thanks, everyone, for all the helpful feedback so far!

I’m on a Windows OS, so I’ll check out that Tyndale keyboard and see if that works out for me.

I see the consensus here seems to be just to dive right into reading some poetry and absorb naturally. I’ve never actually studied any poetry. Thanks for the awesome resources so far! It’s really cool especially to have a digital online Iliad text with scansion and a recording!

My initial request for a vocab learning list that does include macrons still stands, if anyone is aware of such a thing.

11

If you’re that concerned with hidden vowel lengths your best bet is probably the middle Liddell (the Intermediate Liddell & Scott). As you learn new words you can easily make your own flash cards with the vowel quantities marked (marked on only one side, perhaps). I recommend doing that with a bunch of actual physical index cards that you can write on by hand. It’s not a completely superseded technology.

Doesn’t have to be poetry of course. It works with prose too, and prose rhythm is a thing.

But if you’ve never read any poetry, why not try some, without more ado? Or are you so dedicated to finding resources and giving advice that you never get around to actually reading Greek?

12

Very helpful information in this thread.

I think Michael’s suggestion regarding flashcards is very good. If you go that route, you might also consider using a program like Anki: https://apps.ankiweb.net/.
I have found it helpful because it enables one to organize the vocabulary items more readily than can be done with flash cards. So, for example, those items that aren’t sticking in your memory can be reviewed more frequently.

Also, the anki site provides many vocabulary lists, but I have found it more useful to create my own lists. And it had the side effect of improving my touch typing skills in greek. :slight_smile:

13

Hi Chad,

I heard back from Monica at the Hellenic Book Service. She said that she is down to her last copy of the recording of Agamemnon and will check if she can get more from the estate of David Raeburn.

In reading the earlier discussion you pointed to, I chuckled at your comment

i think the guys who did the recording are classicists and so they will likely not have as good a musical ear for getting the rhythm right as you, i go easy on anyone who has a go at doing this stuff

I remembered the opening of Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”:

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

Mark

14

Ouch! I resemble that comment sometimes! Point taken gladly, so let’s get around to some poetry.

I’ve always been a little intimidated to approach poetry because I was always under the impression that a lot of it used other dialects, either the old Homeric or Doric. It’s not really my goal at the moment to do a deep dive into Homer, though I’d love to eventually. I’m working on brushing up rusty grammar and building vocab and working through beginning/intermediate guided readers, with the main goal of reading early Christian, patristic, and Byzantine texts, but a thorough interest in getting around to exploring the classics as well. I just thought it would be nice to learn the right way from the start, to make the transition to poetry easier down the road.

So, is Homer still the best place to start, or are there relatively easy selections from other poets where I wouldn’t be facing a dialect hurdle? Or am I overstating the differences between epic and Attic? I have spent zero time with Homer.

I also appreciate the advice about middle Lidl + making my own flash cards.

15

Thanks for taking my jibe in such good part. Given your goals, I guess you don’t really need to take much interest in poetry. I was misled by your initial post. A good beginning text for you might be the Mark gospel. It’s relatively straightforward Greek, and has a simple but interesting plot-line that it’s possible you’re already familiar with. Avoid interlinears and the word-by-word renderings that bible sites provide.

16

If you’d like the case for starting with Homer and have half an hour, then Clyde Pharr’s essay Homer and the Study of Greek (pp.xiii-xxviii in his Homeric Greek book for beginners, which you might like to explore) is a nice read.

The major hurdles switching from Christian texts to Homer will be vocabulary and what will seem like absolutely wild word order without the definite article to help you (which is actually quite simple once you get into the swing of it). ‘Dialect’ is only a minor issue - Homer has a bunch of different forms all smooshed together in there and you just pick them up. After a while (perhaps through a sort of philological Stockholm syndrome) I became very fond of things like genitives in -οιο and I’m disappointed when they don’t crop up elsewhere. Maybe this is just me.

Sounds right up my street. I’ll have to pick up a copy.