My experiences teaching myself ancient Greek pitch accent

As far as I can tell, the mora in ancient Greek applies only to the vowel part of the syllable, that is, the part of the syllable which can carry sound. It looks like χρόνοι apply to the entire syllable and are more related to syllable weight, that is, heavy or light.

The mora as develped by the Prague School seems to be more of a theoretical analytical device that has been found to be useful in ancient Greek most importantly in allowing a concise version of the accent limitation law of ancient Greek: Not more than one mora may follow the contonation. Of course the notion of the contonation had to be introduced as well in order to get this to work.

I believe that for ancient Greek, the inclusion of the closing consonant of the syllable is not allowed, which differs from the treatment in Latin.

I have this from Auer, in which he discusses mora counting in some pitch-accent languages, but explicitely notes that this does not apply to ancient Greek. Auer, “Some ways to count morae”, 1989.

“In some of the languages with musical accent (but not, for example, in Classical Greek), this second mora may be part of a long vowel, or a consonant. Long vowels must be split into two parts (= morae) so that stress can be placed on either one of them (falling or rising), and vowels and consonants must be treated alike so that the proper generalizations can be made.”

The picture that I am getting for ancient Greek is that only one mora in a word could have a raised pitch. There was definitely a glide back to base level after this mora, and possibly some sort of rise from low to high in the preceding mora. But those preceding and following morae did not alter the fundamental property of only one mora having a raised pitch, and it is important not to think of this frequency modulation as something like what happens in a tone language, in which pitch contour over a syllable is used to differentiate otherwise identical syllables.

Thus it is not correct to picture the circumflex accent as being something like the fourth tone (the falling tone) in Mandarin Chinese. It is simply a raised pitch on the first mora. Similarly the acute in a long vowel or diphthong is simply a raised pitch on the second mora.

Making the entire long vowel high pitch in the case of the acute leads to something like the first tone in Mandarin Chinese (the high level tone), and so is not correct.

In fact I have read some stuff conjecturing about how the transition from pitch accent to stress accent might have taken place in Greek, and one idea is that the circumflex and acute in long vowels or diphthongs started to become indistinguishable due to the raised pitch covering the entire vowel.

Imagine a sentence where several words in a row bear the grave accent: the result of ignoring the grave and staying at the base level sounds quite strange to me

Vasile,

your objection to “complete neutralization” of the grave is shared by others, and was mentioned in Allen, “Accent and Rhthym”, 1973 (page 245) in his discussion of the grave:

“Complete neutralization is rejected by Lupas (1967) on the grounds of its improbability in such a line as Soph., O.T. 130 ἡ ποικιλῳδὸς Σφὶγξ τὰ πρὸς ποσὶ σκοπεῖν, but this is not necessarily a conclusive argument.”

At this point in my studies I have chosen to ignore the grave, not because I feel strongly that that is the correct approach, but just because I want to concentrate for the time being only on the full contonations. I consider the accent of the grave to be a second-order component.

Two books that I know of which discuss the question of the grave at some length are:

  • W. Sydney Allen, “Accent and Rhythm”, 1973
  • Devine and Stephens, “The Prosody of Greek Speech”, 1994

Thank you, katalogon, for sharing your experience on this matter and for the references. By the way, I would appreciate if you have some information/link related to Lupas’ paper cited by Allen.

Vasile,

the author is Romanian, Liana Lupaș.

The article mentioned by Allen is: “L’interprétation phonologique de l’accentuation attique,” 1967.

Here is a link to the journal in which the article is published:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/abs/studii-clasice-ix-1967-pp-398-bucarest-societe-roumaine-des-etudes-classiques-1968-cloth-lei-40/A9B23D48C7E2C1545A9F5295DD6F245B

Here is another link that might be useful:

https://www.persee.fr/doc/antiq_0770-2817_1977_num_46_1_1861_t1_0305_0000_1



Also, note that there are a few recent posts on your question on dividing a long vowel up into two morae.

katalogon,
Many thanks for your reply on mora/χρονος. Ι wrote an acknowledgment and follow-up of some kind but I can now find no trace of it, and think I must have deleted it before sending it. I do still wonder whether the difference between Greek and Latin with regard to syllable vs. vowel is more a matter of school of thought than anything real, but let that go. I’m glad you have mentioned Devine and Stevens in addition to Allen. I’ve followed their work since the beginning, or done my best to.
Of course I recognize that ancient Greek will have worked very differently from the Mandarin tonal system (which I learnt from a close mainland Chinese friend, along with the language itself—up to a point), but I have to admit that the attempt to reconstruct ancient Greek and Latin pronunciation and contonation can for me be little more than an academic exercise, given that experientially it’s irredeemably alien.
But let me again express my renewed appreciation of your very informative posts.

Thank you…
The full article is available here:
https://biblioteca-digitala.ro/?articol=73654-l-interpretation-phonologique-de-l-accentuation-attique--studii-clasice-societatea-de-studii-clasice--ix-1967

Vasile,

I downloaded the article and will go through it.

Thanks!

Totally agree… as a native speaker of Cantonese I struggled with Serbo-Croatian pitch accent a lot…