how close do you think this reading is to the real accent of the ancients?
http://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/iliad1.htm
I am trying to learn but I don’t sound anything like this fellow, and I am trying to stress the accents.
I don’t think the accents should be be stressed if you are trying to use a reconstructed pronounciation. They should be pitched as in Chinese.
I have a copy of this work:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579700969/qid=1128170470/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2108759-2237712?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
It seems very good, although I can’t say whether the accent is particularly authentic or not. Modern day Greek scholars completely disagree with the reconstructed accent, and it has never been clear to me why Greek scholars are held in such low esteem by other classicists when they are the direct descendents of the ancient greeks of which we are learning!
From what I gather, the reason Greek scholars are held is such “low esteem” in regards to pronounciation is because they insist that modern Greek pronounciation is the way to pronounce the classics without much scholarly evidence. Just because you are descended from those people of antiquity does not excuse you from having solid evidence. Of course, this is just what I’ve read between the lines; I haven’t read enough of the literature on reconstructed pronounciation to say this with much authority; perhaps I have unwittingly picked up a prejudice without sufficient factual support.
Mind you, almost everybody agrees that Modern English has drastic prounounciation shifts from Old English. It has been proven that the people who built the pyramids came from the same gene pool as the people living in Egypt today, but the people in Egypt today sure don’t speak Coptic. Genetics has little to do with preserving a language.
Hi.
This so-called “modern” Greek pronounciation has been around for a couple of millenia. That is very convincing evidence.
First, there was the awful Erasmian pronounciation – even Erasmus, himself, didn’t buy into it. Now, we have the “new and improved” – Klingon-sounding – reconstructed pronounciation. What will these non-Greek native speakers come up with next?
Modern pronounciation is relevant, but languages change a lot over time. Even in the difference of a single generation, there are some differences between the way I pronounce English and the way my father speaks English. While we could probably have a conversation with Shakespeare, the historic rhymes and some scanning issues make is clear that there were significent pronounciation differences between now and Elizabethan times. The fact that Greek had to weather several millenia makes me less convinced of its accuracy. I doubt any reconstructed is 100% accurate, but at least, based on what I know about Greek and phonetics, makes more sense.
Nothing short of a machine which could record sounds which happened a few thousand years ago (and who knows, such a machine could be invented a few hundred years from now) could settle the debate.
About the reading, I thought it sounds unnatural to say the least, but as for accuracy, I can’t comment, although somethings sounded much different than I would’ve expected, e.g. his [size=134]ε[/size] was very close to .
One question though: do we know anything about what overall sentence intonation would be like? I noticed that in the reading, statements and questions were pretty much the same in this sense, but that doesn’t seem all that reasonable.
About modern Greek scholars, are there serious scholars who claim that the pronunciation has never changed? Because this is a totally different issue than how those works should be pronounced today, and I don’t see what would be wrong with pronouncing it the modern way. Shakespeare was taught to me and is performed with modern accents too, even though this can destroy rhyming schemes.
In my case, I try to read classical works with some kind of reconstructed accent (but both pitch and length differences are difficult for me), but the bible I read with a modern pronunciation, not only because many of the changes could have occured by the time it was written, but also because that’s how it’s read in my church and in that sense it’s still a living language. I don’t see how this method is worse than the usual pronunciation that is taught, which is both historically inaccurate and doesn’t sound too great either.
Pitch accent and a tone language like Chinese are completely different things.
Modern day Greek scholars completely disagree with the reconstructed accent, and it has never been clear to me why Greek scholars are held in such low esteem by other classicists when they are the direct descendents of the ancient greeks of which we are learning!
Patriotic and nationalist Greeks disagree with the reconstructed accent. Greek scholars of Greek, while still using the modern pronunciation they were raised on, know perfectly well that language changes over the centuries. There are some hold-outs of course, but opinion is hardly unanimous that the Anglo-Saxon world is afflicting the Greeks with some plot by promoting the reconstructed pronunciation.
I have never been a fan of Daitz’s pronunciation. I find the pitch contours way too wide.
why Greek scholars are held in such low esteem by other classicists when they are the direct descendents of the ancient greeks of which we are learning!
not so direct.. not so direct.. some greeks might be phantasizing they are though.
modern greeks are more or less a mixture noumerous people: latins, slavs and so on.
I would consider myself more of a balkan.
Patriotic and nationalist Greeks disagree with the reconstructed accent.
that would be quite right.
I would connect it also with the mighty orthodox church tradition.
I, being a modern greek, use the modern greek accent to read the ancients. I know it’s wrong but reading in an erasmian/reconstructed accent - or just pronouncing eta as long epsilon - is just awkward. It feels completelly ALIEN to the sound of modern greek. The same goes for some consonants like delta,theta etc.
now, in my opinion, it would be obsurd if a non modern greek insisted on pronouncing greek the modern greek way.
the poetic metrics all get destroyed, and pronouncing (e^=eta) he^, he^i, hoi, )\e^, (\e^, e)/i*, all as the mighty “i” is and has to remain a schizophrenic virtue of modern greeks.
*or in unicode:ἡ, ἧι, ἤ, ἥ, εἴ, οἱ
I’m not a philologist, but I am a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese. Please explain your comment to me. You seem to be making a distinction without a difference.
In Mandarin Chinese, every morpheme can carry a “pitch change”. Chinese call this a “tone”, but the pitch contour tells the tale. The only difference that I have noted between the “rising tone” in Mandarin Chinese and the “acute accent” of Classical Greek is that the rising tone represents a notional increase in pitch of a musical minor third, whereas there are claims that the “acute accent” in Classical Greek represented an increase in pitch of musical fifth - about twice as wide a gap in pitch as in Chinese.
Another obvious difference is that the pitch accent as advocated by Stephen G. Daitz (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579700969/qid=1128351136/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2108759-2237712?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) contours over an entire word comprised of multiple morphemes, whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the contour is over each individual morpheme. In this sense, perhaps Classical Greek could be considered less pitched than Mandarin Chinese.
Modern Mandarin Chinese also has over-all pitch decline during the course of an utterance. This is tied to a physiological factor, the drop of sub-glottal pressure, so unless human physiology has changed a lot these last twenty-five centuries, this contour probably existed in Classical Greek also.
I know that there is another, theory about the Greek pitch accent (http://arts.anu.edu.au/linguistics/People/AveryAndrews/Homer/pitch.htm), but is that widely-accepted now?
What other differences between Classical Greek pitch accent and Modern Mandarin Chinese tonal system were you thinking of? Besides these differences in pitch systems, I have not found any other differences in the prosody of Classical Greek speech and Mandarin Chinese speech that I have been able to read on the Internet.
OK. Not unanimous. But there is definitely Greek scholarly thought that the non-Greek scholars are off-base. e.g., http://www.bsw.org/?l=72081&a=Art06.html
As a non-philologist, the only supporting evidence which I have found for the reconstructed pronunciation, which seems indisputable to me is:
Cratinus, in Dionysalexandros: ο δ’ ηλιθιος ωσπερ προβατον βη βη λεγων βαδιζει: the fool goes about like a sheep saying “ba ba” (vs. “ve ve”).
I don’t know how nationalistic Greeks could explain this one away, but other than that, the rest of the evidence I’ve seen doesn’t really move me.
What evidence exists that the original Classical Greek pitch contours were narrower? I am just asking because I don’t find very much scientific information on the Internet about the classical Greek pitch accent (only descriptive information), and would be much obliged if you could directly me to some more detailed scholarly description.
wo hai shuo hanyu yidian. The point I was making is that the pitch accent of Greek doesn’t define word meaning the same way it does in the tone languages. Elsewhere on this forum I have compared the sound of Greek accents to particular tones in Chinese, but it wasn’t clear to me that you were making that point.
OK. Not unanimous. But there is definitely Greek scholarly thought that the non-Greek scholars are off-base. e.g., > http://www.bsw.org/?l=72081&a=Art06.html
I have talked about that article on Textkit before. It is useless (near the bottom).
There are two parts to my objection. The first is basically esthetic. I’ve heard some fairly artificial recitation styles, and I’m actually a defender of such things for metered verse, but something about Daitz’s recitation seems way overdone.
The second matter is his pronunciation of the circumflex. He uses a rise and fall. It seems more likely to me to be a simple high-falling contour (this is the view in Sihler’s comparative grammar, too).
His rise and fall circumflex combined with the wide pitch variation makes it seem too wide to me.
As you know, Mandarin Chinese does make active use of the falling-rising contour over a single morpheme. Therefore, I don’t think that, theoretically, a rising-falling contour is impractical or implausible, in the absence of other information to suggest that the authentic contour was something different. Certainly, the most direct interpretation of the evidence I have found on the Internet for the reconstructed pitch accent would be to use a rising-falling contour for the circumflex accent. (Mandarin Chinese speakers prove every day that average people can make these bending pitch changes faster in normal conversation than would have even been necessary for Classical Greek.) Other historical evidence could suggest otherwise for Greek, however.
So my earlier question rephrased would be: What historical evidence is there for one particularly contour vs. another? For example, what evidence does Sihler use in defense of his proposal of the correctness of a high-falling contour versus the more direct rising-falling contour?
Going back to the my earlier comment on musical fifths versus musical minor thirds, I would have to say that if scholars are right that the Classical Greeks actually had pitch changes of a musical fifth, then they had better pitch control in speech than native Chinese speakers, and I would certainly not doubt their ability to manage a rising-falling contour over a single vowel! In this respect, Stephen G. Daitz’s rising-falling contour may be incorrect only because he was not born to a language which uses such pitch contours, and therefore he may not have practiced enough to make pitch changes quickly. This could give him a wider contour (longer vowel) than strictly appropriate. But the pitch contour for a circumflex could still be right, even if he has difficulty performing it correctly on the recording.
He’s not a professional philologist, but seems to be quite a scholarly chap:
http://www.teol.lu.se/nt/forskning/caragounis.html
I would not be so quick to dismiss him as being outside the mainstream, as his other academic work does not seem to brand him as an intellectual outlier.
Hi, William
It’s not a question about patriotism and/or nationalism. Greeks, in general, passionately disagree with the reconstructed pronunciation because it sounds beastly. Truly beastly! The Greeks did not care for the awkward Erasmian pr. (and how right they were!). Why should they cover their ears and acquiesce now?
And as for the Anglo - Saxon world, it dropped its load a long time ago. With its impending third world status (have you been to a Walmart lately? 3/4 of all goods are “Made in China”!), I doubt these Anglo - Saxons have the time nor resources to hatch any plot, let alone afflicting the Greeks with the promotion of the rec. pr. 
Can you address this point:
Greekness (or, if you prefer, Hellenism) had never to do with race. Race, per se, was an alien concept to the Ancients. It had to do with language, culture/religion, and education.
While it is true that through Greece’s long history many migrations and invasions occurred, all these foreign inhabitants who stayed behind were eventually – within a generation or two – Hellenized. This Hellenization process was a noble and progressive act by the Greeks. Would you rather have had the Greeks slaughter all foreigners in the name of racial purity?
If you want to call yourself a Balkan, it is your prerogative to use a Turkish word to describe your heritage. I prefer the attribute Greek to describe my heritage.
Do me a favour: Leave the Greek Orthodox Church out of it. It may, like all organized religions, have its shortcomings but it does NOT have any blood on its hands like a few of the other “Christian” denominations.
I thought you said you were a Balkan? Or was it Vulcan?
I’m not dismissing him as being outside the mainstream, I’m dismissing him for shoddy scholarship. His article is riddled with factual errors of the most basic sort. The simplest errors would be corrected by any standard college level linguistics course, and some of the obscurer blunders would be corrected by a little time in a library. I’m dismissing his paper because it is full of falsehoods.