This has bugged me for a long time. Does anybody have a way of thinking about this? My problem is more with the ει. If it were a diphthong, none of this would bother me. But it is a monophthong. I basically understand it and how it is supposed to sound. But when I am reading Greek, I find it almost impossible to keep the sounds distinct. I end up with two sounds: one for ε and another for both ει and η. Nothing has turned me off more to reading out loud than this issue. But I have to do some oral stuff soon and need to figure out a way of approaching it. Mastronarde says ει is like the German Beet, but my German is laughable. Do German speakers find it easier to make these distinctions?
I picked option 4.
To be honest even my pronunciation of my native tongue, English, is not that great even though I endured several years of speech therapy during my early school years. So I tend not to get all tied up in knots over the fact that my pronunciation of ancient Greek must stink also.
Ok, I won’t vote here because I pronounce it /i/. I’m lame like that. Basically though it’s going to be, depending on period, one of those differences that native speakers would have understood but us not so much, it often happens with foreign languages.
The thinking on this varied btw, its somewhat obvious that throughout the classical period these were very much distinct though later both sounds would collapse. Essentially ei and h would be similarish, with the later being more naturally more open and wider. You have to produce a very similar sound using different parts of your mouth.
/i/ is already being used and doubly so. I guess you are using the short /i/? That is lame. Different quality and length? I’m disappointed in you. No more scoffing at Daitz. Gonna start calling you Scriiibo.
One is short and the other is long. ε is about as short a vowel as you can have. By the time you get your mouth to prepared say η, you can say ε twice.
And I’m going to think of ει as a kind of neighing sound, where you open your mouth as you do at the dentist’s, really letting the air get between your lips and gums.
I know right? I often have β as /v/ too just out of habit, so Scrivo maybe? Yeah, some habits are hard to break out of. Unless I’m reading metrically, which means that those problems solve themselves but then you’ve got to deal with my overall poor voice.
When I started Greek, I pronounced η basically as a long variant of ε and ει as diphtong. I still might do so, but I try to make ει just a long /e/ sound and η another long e sound.
I think the analogy with French is a good starting point, but French has two e sounds.Très, même, mais are open sounds like η and nez is a closed sound like ει - only make those sounds longer than the French ones. But then the problem is that these two sounds are nearly complementary in distribution and are nowadays almost not phonemically distinct anymore in “standard” French. So although I speak fluent French, I have difficulty distinguishing the difference between those two sounds. When you listen to some old songs in French or other old stuff, they often make a better distinction than you’ll now hear in the street nowadays. (Just hear how Jacques Brel pronounces même! (0:53))
So French has both “ει” and “η” but isn’t much help for me. So what I do is that I exaggerete the openness of η and pronounce it almost like Finnish /ä/ - which is much like English man. Maybe that’s too much, but this makes it clearly a distinct phoneme, so I don’t have to be so careful to keep my ει closed enough.
Nobody has to listen to my Greek though, I pronounce Greek only to myself…
Seriously, thank you, I’ve been looking for songs etc in French to listen to and improve my accent and that looks amazing. I can get around whenever I’m in French but I’m never 100% happy with my accent since I’ve never had a chance to work on it. Now, I do, and this stuff comes along. Awesome.
Brel is pedagogical but please note that if you speak like that in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might be considered a snob and end up with a nosebleed or worse… It’s not uncommon for French teachers, some politicians etc. to speak like that on occasion though. You might want to check out Georges Brassens too…
Another thing about ει is that in early Greek like Homer it’s really two different sounds, sometimes a diphthong and sometimes a long monophthong and you never know when because the spelling reflects Attic pronunciation. And it’s the same thing with ου.
It’s better than how I sound now! I grew up in quite a multi-lingual environment and have always been able to imitate accents admirably however French poses a few problems. In particular I do this weird thing where I’ll be speaking passably normal…and then throw in a grossly, insanely, hyperbolically exaggerated word and people will be like:
I don’t really see Atticisms in Homer, though there are obvious areas where the Old Ionic elphabet sort of failed, so it may well ought to be OLLOMENEN rather than OU but then they didn’t really distinguish e, ei, h, o, w, ou that well either. These texts aren’t too good a model for usage though, since they were essentially crib sheets. Is that the term? No idea..heard it on Friends once, we don’t use it England.
I didn’t mean Atticicisms really, just that I think that both ει and ου are one sound each in Attic, but Homer distinguishes two different sounds for each. ει was either a long closed /e/ (like εἰμί) or a true diphthong (like εἶμι). Also I think in ἀκούουσιν the first ου used to be a true diphthong but the second was always a long vowel (long /u/ or closed /o/). These aren’t reflected in writing because Attic doesn’t make a distinction, but I wouldn’t call these Atticisms.
I rarely if ever post anything on threads about pronunciation in general or taking
a stand on the right/wrong debate. I only learned the pronunciation from my university
professor, a native Hebrew speaker, who got his classics education in Germany, as far as I
can recall. x was always pronounced as a our Hebrew khaf (kaf without a dagesh), φ as
feh (peh without a dagesh) and θ as the Arabic thā’ (or, the conjectural ancient Hebrew thaf, taf
without a dagesh). Iota subscript was always pronounced since it was the 5th c. BCE we were dealing
with. His υ (German ü) was something I could never reproduced, simply because I was not used to
this type of sound. Nor could I ever roll my ρ, nor has he ever taught us to do so; we merely
pronounced it the way Modern Hebrew speakers pronounce their ר, like the french r. ζ was
pronounced as /dz/, not /zd/.
ει was always pronounced as a diphthong, as in the sound /ey/ in English, distinct from η
which was just a slightly longer ε.
Really, though, who cares how anyone pronounce or should pronounce these sounds?
It’s not like Socrates would just spring out of nowhere and rebuke you in his ironical fashion
for not pronouncing them correctly. Although I would pay my top drachmas to see that.
Pretty obviously I care or I wouldn’t have put up the post. I don’t care that much about getting the historically correct pronunciation. What bothers me is that I don’t have two distinct sounds ready to hand.
I’m not sure what part of his pronunciation of même you are referring to. Pronouncing the second “e” is standard in classical French poetry/drama as long as it is within the line and not followed by a vowel. One hears the extra syllable a lot in French singing down to today. Cue 2:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wXcvx4EYG4
I suppose the “ê” is different from what we hear today, but it’s not clear how much of that is due to time passing and how much of it is due to particularities of that sung performance.
Sorry, I was a bit unclear. I was referring to ê in même, not the second e which is just schwa or whatever. Anyway, I can’t quote any authority on this, but I think it’s a general tendency that in more traditional chanson or formal speech the distinction between the open and closed e is kept more distinct than in everyday talk. It’s the same thing with open and closed /o/ I think. I don’t think Brel spoke in normal conversations like that, like he didn’t probably make liaison with infinitive-final r’s either in normal speech. I think you could call these archaizing features.
To me it seems like the distinction between open and closed /e/ in French is disappearing and these sounds might be in the process of merging into a single phoneme. I checked up Wikipedia’s article “French phonology”, they’re saying that “allait [alɛ] (‘was going’), vs. allé [ale] (‘gone’)” are at least a minimal pair. To me the difference between these two seems very slight, maybe I make a distinction when I’m speaking but I’m not aware of it consciously. I’m not a native speaker though, but almost, my dad’s French and I’ve been speaking French most of my life.
I’m lame like that. Basically though it’s going to be, depending on period, one of those differences that native speakers would have understood but us not so much, it often happens with foreign languages.
It’s not uncommon for French teachers, some politicians etc. to speak like that on occasion though. You might want to check out Georges Brassens too…
