You can actually skip all my rumblings and go to the last part of my message.
In another site I found while surfing the net, someone asked for help in deciding how to pronounce ancient Greek.
Since I am hardly an expert on the matter, I explained to him that I have only some theoretical knowledge of the issue and I proposed to him that he should visit this site only stating that he should bear in mind that, according to the era of ancient Greek he would focus on as his studies progressed, he should use a different accent. This must be one of the two reasons my post there got deleted by the moderator or administrator of the site.
The other must be that it seems that these guys oppose any post that doesn’t dismiss non-modern Greek accent out of hand.
I also received a PM stating that being Greek I should actively discourage anyone from not using our way of pronouncing ancient Greek and a link to a long article.
When I read that, it made me just laugh and laugh and laugh.
If I may be publicly sanctimonious for a moment — please do forgive me — I would like to observe that in the Great Pronunciation Debates on Textkit I have not once deleted a post containing arguments I didn’t like, though I have the Power to do so.
The other must be that it seems that these guys oppose any post that doesn’t dismiss non-modern Greek accent out of hand.
“Besides this word, direct evidence for beta comes from a fragment of Attic comedy where it is said that the voice of the sheep is BH-BH.(3) In Modern Greek this would read as “vi-vi?, rather un-sheepish-like; while in the reconstructed way it would be “beeh-beeh?, exactly the sound that we, contemporary Greeks, attribute to the animal.”
I’ll bet that Greeks will say that it isn’t their language that has changed, but Sheepish.
I’m convinced that modern greeks who share these opinions don’t care at all about pronunciation as such, or ancient greek literature as such. The only thing they care about is proclaiming all that in any way might be “greek” their own. And the only reason they present these garbage in pseudoscientific forms is that a mere anathema/sententia coming from the greek-orthodox church would be a couple of centuries late.
I remember one day last summer, I woke up early and in the mood for a long, feverish iliad session. So I went to the library - where the dictionaries etc are. After a couple of hours of reading, I sense an elder man bending above me; he asks: “so, how’s grandpa Hommer?”. To cut a long story short, I end up having to defend myself against yields and a delirius speech culminating in the unbelievable “Homeric greek is a 12.000 years old language, , of extragalactic origin. we Greeks should revert to homeric pronunciation,by means of a radical and fundamental educational reform (namely a junta), starting in kindergarten”.
the old man was retired high school teacher.
thanks for making me laugh everyone, I needed that !
Sorry for re-posting this hmm article, I hadn’t noticed it. You could teach those guys over that site a thing or two about democracy for sure (although now that I re-think about it you probably can’t what with Greece being the craddle of democracy and so on and so forth)
nostos, I am sure I don’t know what you mean. Of course it’s Sheepish that changed.
Elis, what can I say?He should meet with one of my uncles They’d get along famously
It is hard to imagine a reason why posts would be deleted because moderators do not share opinions that are expressed in it.
Unless ofcourse that particular forum has as one of its rules never to discuss pronunciation.
[kidding]But then, we all know how rude Irene can be. She probably deserved to be disciplined[/kidding]
I think you mean el gran Bardo de Saldo. I haven’t made any comments on this because I don’t know any Greek, modern or otherwise, but I’m inclined to disagree (radically) with the article you posted. It seems absurd.
However I agree that Sheepish has changed. Unfortunately, that does nothing to ameliorate the pain I currently feel for the duration of writing this essay on (a translation of) Plato’s Republic
well, it seems that elis has really looked into this thing, something I can assure you the vast majority of modern Greeks hasn’t since there are really only a laughable few who actually have/believe in such a ridiculous notion and most of us are actually too bored by their nonsense to bother.
It’s one thing to disagree with my foolish compatriots and quite another to generilise in this way.
Sheepish was a slightly more synthetic language, and was pitch based. However, with the adoption of industry in humans of the species Homo sapiens it has become more timbre-based, and aggultinative. Of course, synthetic elements still remain but the demand for quick communication means that short interjections of only 4 morae are in vogue. Gone are the long oscillating vowels of late 16th century Sheepish, when the Emphatic case and more fundamentally the altissimo rise tone were standardised.
However, a lot of Ancient Sheepish (from the BC era, when cows were not on farms) is unrecognisable to modern Sheepish ears.
THIS IS A FICTION (GENERATED BY THE MILITANT ANTI-LAMBIST COMMITTEE)
They’d get along famously
