Offended by modern phonology in Ancient Greek classroom

Greek Learning Greek
1

Ok, the first thing I did was buy the Daitz CD’s on pronouncing the restored classical way, and make sure I had it. I take great pains in correct phonology and accent since poetry should be read in that way, and also I find it to be the soul and beauty of the language, in the unique accent and sounds of each language, especially the elegant pitch accent which makes stress accents sound barbaric to me, and the unique “puhtah” of unEnglish sounds like φθ that starts a word,

I heard though, through the internet, a classroom recording of a teacher speaking Ancient greek to her class, I think in fact they are online transcripts, but all these βάρβαροι, (Hope I have that accent mark right), to my shock she was sounding WEIRD with arabic like “ch” and dental fricatives, when I realized she was using modern greek phonology entirely. I know my basic linguistics, languages change, and that is that, but something offends me about the incorrect use of phonology on Classical attic. Especially the modern greeks presumption that there is no difference between modern and ancient pronunciations.

Is it wrong for me to hold non-pitch accenters in contempt? I view the pitch accent and the restored classical method as something of great historical and aethetic value, but sadly it requires effort and scholarship to understand and accept that modern greek’s pronunciations are anachronistic when applied to the age of Pericles.

Pericles simply did not go “cchhh”

2

I would say that being offended and contemptuous is a bit overboard :wink:

3

Yes, it’s anachronistic and unfortunate, but it’s also become a matter of tradition and habit that won’t change anytime soon. As you say, a correct understanding of Ancient Greek phonetics is important for fully appreciating poetry and the language’s rhythm. However, when it comes to reading, pronunciation (alas) falls to the wayside. People commonly adopt the method that is practical or expected of them. The way it distorts the language’s character is surely overcome by the number of people who can learn the language more easily with a simplified pronunciation.

I’ve heard that Greeks don’t really view Ancient Greek and Modern Greek as two separate languages, but rather treat them as a continuum. Given this viewpoint, it’s natural that they continue to speak the way they do today while reading older texts.

4

Calm down, I’d say being offended is a touch too far. In fact more a leap and a bound too far, I understand you may have a preference and, like me, feel that forcing modern phonology onto the ancient tongue is horrid, but none the less you’re being a bit extravagant.

Incidentally I am familiar with mod Greek and the way it sounds and I do think it makes Anc Greek sound pretty awful and that the arguments for using a modern pronunciation are convoluted and erroneous. Still I’m far from OFFENDED…

5

You cannot control how you feel. Nothing wrong with being offended by how something sounds to you. I have no doubt that you get more out of Ancient Greek poetry by pronouncing it the way you think it was pronounced at the time. Would I get more out of Chaucer or even Shakespeare if I bothered to take the time to try to figure out how it was pronounced at the time and pronounce it that way instead of in a way which sounds fine and natural to me? Probably? Would I bother? No. Am I offended when Americans speak Shakespeare with an American accent? I’m not, but I understand why one would be.

I prefer a pronunciation which sounds the way I would speak Ancient Greek and is one that is easiest to understand. For me this is American Erasmianism. You probably know that many Modern Greeks are even more offended by Erasmian than you are by Modern Greek. It’s all good. To be offended is to be human.
For what it is worth, I find reconstructed Attic to be by far the MOST dificult to understand when read aloud. I find the attempt to reconstruct the pitch accents annoying and a little silly.

6

I can certainly empathize with the feeling… It always makes me cringe when I hear people read Greek with a bad American accent, or a bad British or German or French or New Zealand accent, no matter what style of Greek pronunciation they’re aiming for.

But I think it’s important to remember that we don’t reeeeeeeally know what Classical Attic sounded like. Yes, we can be confident that Daitz and others have reconstructed the phonemes and pitch accents fairly accurately. But these are far from the only factors that contribute to the overall sound of a language (or it’s “soul and beauty,” or “elegance,” as you put it). For instance, we can never know what range of allophonic variation existed between the phonemes. We can never know how sounds influenced surrounding sounds, except to a very limited degree – for instance, we know from spelling mistakes in papyri and inscriptions that nasal assimilation happened across word boundaries: τὸν πρῶτον was pronounced τὸμ πρῶτον, τὴν κεφαλὴν was τὴγ κεφαλήν, etc. But many similar processes could have operated and never impacted the orthography, and we would never know about them. For instance, in modern English, we know from spelling that “it is” contracts to “it’s.” But if someone has never heard English spoken, would they ever guess that the “t” is usually dropped in “it would”? (At least in American English, at normal conversational speed.) We can only guess at the intonation contour across the course of a whole Greek sentence. We can not know how “forcefully” the syllables were articulated, whether people spoke with more or less throat constriction, advanced tongue root, or any of a whole range of phenomena that have a huge impact on the subjective impression of what a language “sounds like.”

Does anyone think that reading a textbook description of the phonology of Thai, or Mandarin, or Italian – even one written by a linguist – would enable someone who has never heard those languages to pronounce them even remotely similar to how a native speaker would pronounce them in continuous discourse? Would they even come close to capturing what we regard as the “essence” or “soul” of their distinctive sound? I defy anyone to try. And until they do, no one has any right to be too conceited about the “purity” of their Ancient Greek reconstruction.

7

An excellent reply, and no doubt true, but I would add that while the details can never be known, still, we know that beta was a bilabial, and not a dental-labial. Therefore, whatever the failings of the restored accent may be, it is still more accurate by far in core phonology than modern Greek, or even worse, American-Englished Ancient Greek. That one method is imperfect should not make us conclude that it is still not the best available option.

8

I have listened to some of the acclaimed audio of “properly” spoken ancient Greek and cannot believe that scholars have yet discovered the right sound which would have made so many claim Greek was a beautiful sounding language. Myself, I am constantly trying out new accents, combining Swedish and Chinese or Japanese pitch accents with Welsh and French pronunciations. These utterances come closer to something my modern European ears would prefer. I wonder how others’ experiments along these lines have turned out.

9

Hey Rusty,

That’s an interesting suggestion… What I personally aim for is not so much to make it sound like any specific modern language, but rather to subtract the features that are distinctively English. For instance, we know that the vowels would have been pure sounds, not glides. The t’s and d’s would have been dental, not alveolar. The unaspirated stops would have been unaspirated – incidentally, I think that’s a much harder feature for English speakers to reproduce: it’s pretty easy to aspirate theta, phi, and chi; the trick is to de-aspirate tau, pi, and kappa, and to maintain the contrast consistently. (Listening to Hindi can help with that.) As far as the pitch accent, to me it seems kind of pointless to pronounce some kind of elaborate rising and falling contour, which is bound to come almost entirely from your own imagination. I just try to give the accented syllables a higher pitch – and maybe give the circumflex a falling tone (as in Serbo-Croatian). It seems like that is as close as we can realistically get to ancient pronunciation; anything more specific is impossible to prove or disprove, and not really worth the effort.

10

Good ideas, though much of what you said is 10 feet over my head. I’ll investigate.
Gratias et Xaire

11

I am glad you are listening and attempting to recreate the classical accent. However I am somewhat thrown off by your message in that you use the word acclaimed (in presumably a facetious manner), and place the word properly in quotes. Are you questioning the general historical linguistical validity of the restored classical accent? See Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek by W.S. Allen, for an in-depth examination of how the experts have recreated the pronunciation.

In any case, I think the pitch accent, if not in fact then in spirit, is not so difficult that it requires you to imitate Swedish or Chinese prosody. In fact, you simply rise the pitch of your voice instead of the volume of it. It is not that difficult once you practice it for a few minutes.

In fact, your mention of Chinese seems bizarre to me, as the Chinese languages’ tonal system is utterly different in every possible way from Greek and a simply pitch accent, and whatever accent Greek had.

I advise you to stop imitating Germanic or other Barbaric languages and instead try Daitz’s Pronunciation and Reading of Ancient Greek: A Practical Guide to have what I think is the best chance of making a fairly close approximation of the Greek of Pericles and Cleon.

12

Perhaps I am unable to separate myself from my environment and time. But I have listened to many recordings of ancient Greek, none of which I could listen to without wincing. We are told that foreigners heard a beautiful song of a language when listening to the Greeks speak. Unfortunately, this foreigner cannot report the same. No offense, just being honest.

13

While I wouldn’t as far as reporting wincing, I’d tend to agree with you. At most, reconsructed Greek recordings sound ordinary if a little unnatural, at worst, they sound absolutely horrible; I’d put Daitz nearer to the latter end of the spectrum.

14

I feel like such a heretic.

15

At first some questions as a quick reply. When somenone reads Shakespeare, does (s)he have to pronounce the text the way Shakespeare spoke? And what about Homer? Does anyone have to read in a different way than when (s)he reads classic Attic? And what about Doric, Aeolic forms? An -A- in Sparta or in Thebes was really pronounced like an -A- in Athens? What about Pindar, or Sappho, or Archilochus?

These are the problem with languages not any more spoken … And as I think there can be enough freedom to different pronounciation.

But I would like us to take under consideration the following thinking. In scholarship there is the tradition of writing Greek the way the texts have reached us, and not of course in capitals, or without separating or yphenating the words etc. Why should anyone ignore the phonetic developement in Greek up to now and take up the restored pronounciation as he only way to learn and speak Greek?

As Greek myself I have only one answer to the above: because the - so called- Erasmic, or better the scientifically restored by historical linguistics pronounciation makes indeed huge difference in comprehending poetry, metric, accentuation, rhythm, as already said. And nothing else… Nevertheless, this is only of scienticic-scholarly importance, not of aesthetic at all in my opinion.

16

I must confess that for me Ancient Greek has no sound at all. I have tried to read Homer out loud, following the meter, trying a pitch (and failing miserably at that last one, I have no clue), but when I do that, I fail to understand what I am reading.

Recently I listened to a rendering of Euripides’ “Orestes Stasimo” by Atrium Musica de Madrid & Gregorio Paniagua (another rendering here).

Text is:

κατολοφύρομαι κατολοφύρομαι.
ματέρος αἷμα σᾶς, ὅ σ᾽ἀναβακχεύει.
ὁ μέγας ὄλβος οὐ μόνιμος ἐν βροτοῖς:
ἀνὰ δὲ λαῖφος ὥς
τις ἀκάτου θοᾶς τινάξας δαίμων
κατέκλυσεν δεινῶν πόνων ὡς πόντου
λάβροις ὀλεθρίοισιν ἐν κύμασιν.

Same effect. Although I liked it a lot, the whole atmosphere of the piece, I was unable to follow the text, even after having read the lyrics and having learnt them by heart for this purpose. Is this song doing anything with pitch anyway?

17

You’re not alone. I heard one of Daitz’ recordings once, and, after I got done laughing, I got down on my knees and prayed to God Almighty that ancient Greek did not really sound like that. That’s not because I think Daitz did anything in particular wrong, not being knowledgable enough to say, but simply because it sounded overly dramatized and silly to my ear. It sounded like a cross between the stereotypes of an old-timey southern (US) political orator and a Swede.

BTW, for those who hate hearing things in a poor accent, you’ll love to hate Brad Pitt’s Italian accent in Inglourious Basterds. But maybe that’s just me. I am mainly of German extraction, and Germans don’t have a good ear for Italian. :wink:

18

Two of you have cast doubt on the beauty of Daitz’s accent. I have to agree that his recordings are off-putting, although not quite as horrible as some have claimed, but I also think he is deliberately overdoing it in order to demonstrate the accent for academic purposes. I also know he is not a voice actor but just really some college Prof trying to make an academic recording. They were also made in the early 1980’s on tape. Since almost no one other than academics seems to know the restored accent, and the classics in the West seem to be strongly biased in favor of latin, he doesn’t have much competition, so perhaps we are biased ourselves against the accent when a 30-year old recording of an academic has now become the standard for the pronunciation of Pericles (alliteration!)

In contrast about the Latin bias, there is a recent “fake Cicero” recording by John Hall, “Performing Cicero’s Pro Archia DVD”, where he is on camera, complete in authentic period Toga; there seems to just be a lot more interest in Living Latin rather than living Classical Greek.

I understand the feeling you get about Daitz, but I think it relates only to his own idiosyncratic style, and if performed by a voice actor or someone with a skilled ear (a Bard? Lyre player? That’s what foreigners would have heard and remembered, I would think?), the inherit quality of the language would be expressed more effectively. To be blunt, the guy is a professor, and may have no musical training at all, for all I know. The guy is not a siren, for Phoebus’ sake! (Allusion!)

I also think we shouldn’t have exaggerated views of how beautiful it is; I still think it is beautiful, but in a more delicate sense, as with its careful pitches, and the distinctive circumflex pitch and delay, and the fearless consonant clusters, such as φθ starting a word (expose the Barbarians! Shibboleth!) but all words end in a vowel, nu, or sigma (I think). This to me gives Attic a distinct and delicate sound, and yes beautiful if spoken beautifully, as any language can be so if done so.

I think the better view is not that classical Greek is more beautiful than another language, but rather that its beauty is in its uniqueness of sound, and delicate-sounding pitch accent, which to me sounds quite the opposite as the rougher German-sounding stress accent that is present even in Latin. No one accuses Castillian or Parisian French of not being beautiful languages, but as fine as they are, the vowel lengths and pitches of Attic sets it apart in a certain way that I appreciate.

19

Fully agree, I think that the scholarship on pronunciation is certainly valuable and an approximate sound is rather useful for working with poetry. Regardless 90% of the recordings I’ve heard have sounded absolutely ridiculous (there is some good stuff out there) and, as I mentioned earlier, getting “offended” by modern phonology is a massive over reaction. Spend your time on other things, like learning irregular verb stems and the third declension.

20

Funny, but it seems to me that my Baptist preacher comes the closest to using the proper pitch and rhythm for ancient Greek. Maybe that’s where that modern “preacher talk” way of speaking comes from, from attempts in seminary to produce that old time Greek speak. Ha, imagine the ancient Greeks all speaking like Baptist preachers!

Xaire,
Robiginosus Caementarius