Are there any videos aimed at helping beginners learn how to pronounce diphthongs and long vowels, and how long to hold diphthongs and long vowels? What about videos which teach the pitch accent?
English being my native language, pitch is entirely foreign to me and I’m really not sure how a language with pitch accents would even sound.
We don’t know proper pronunciation. You’ll have to wing it. There are recordings all over the web, and each reader has got his own system.
But you can do this even without a video. Vowel length is the difference between the ‘i’ in ‘big’ and the one in ‘little.’ Worry more about short vowels being short than longs being long, and you’re on the right track. Diphthongs are always going to come out long, unless you deliberately shorten them, say for αι and οι.
Pitch is not so foreign to you. English’s stress accent has three parts: a rise in pitch, an increase in loudness, and a lengthening of vowels. You’ll have to break that last habit to fake a Greek pitch accent.
Think of Greek words not in terms of syllables, but as a sequence of time intervals. One interval is the length of the small ‘i.’ (Refer back to ‘big’ and ‘little.’) A long vowel has two intervals.
In a short vowel, you have only one option: accent the vowel. With practice, you can stress it without lengthening it, and that’s a rise in pitch.
In a long vowel, you could accent either the first interval or the second. Accenting the first will sound like βῖγ. Accenting the second will sound like βίγ. In English, ‘big’ versus ‘big?’ Does that make sense?
Alternatively, listen to languages with pitch accents. Lithuanian and Sanskrit are probably your best bets, being cousins of Greek. There are recordings of the Lithuanian Bible on Youtube. You can find the text online, and it’s much easier to read than Sanskrit.
Dear Wishfulcrystal.
As Michael says, there’s no such thing as “proper pronunciation” of ancient Greek. But there’s no lack of strongly held opinions about it! You can learn a lot for example from this Textkit topic: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/audio-for-classical-texts-in-demotic/15360/1
Some recordings you may want to check out (and I’m going to be lazy and avoid finding the links):
(1) The lectures and readings (including the entire Iliad and Odyssey) of Stephen Daitz, available from Bolchazy-Carducci. Many people have an adverse physical reaction, literally, to what they perceive as Daitz’s extreme shrillness, but you should check his readings out, they’re kind of a classic.
(2) The CD’s that accompany Oxford University Press’s Athenaze and Cambridge’s Reading Greek. If I recall correctly, the Athenaze recordings start with a guide to (classically restored) pronunciation as well as pitch, and they use pitch in their reading of the first few chapters, before abandoning pitch and simply using stress. Many English-speaking people, at least, I would say probably the majority of ancient Greek students (including myself), abandoned our efforts at pitch as just too difficult and impractical. Again if I recall correctly, the Reading Greek recordings (also using classically restored pronunciation) stick with pitch. But in both cases, the recordings are only for the first few chapters of the respective textbooks.
(3) A personal favorite of mine was Le Grec ancien (part of the French Assimil: La méthode intuitive series). The accompanying recordings cover the entire book (of 101 lessons), so you get a sustained experience, and they are very clearly articulated. I don’t remember exactly what they do with pitch. I recommend the book itself, if you are just learning Greek.
There’s lots more out there, but to narrow the search: Is your intention to learn and use the classically restored pronunciation, or Koine, or modern Greek? (And I’m assuming you know the difference?) Are you learning and practicing your pronunciation in your early stage of learning Greek, or is it more that you’ve learned the fundamentals of Greek and have reached a stage where you want to improve/perfect your pronunciation? If the former, you probably want to pick an approach and stay with it consistently. If the latter, you may be more willing to experiment.
Randy Gibbons
I assumed there was something like a standard pronunciation modern English-speaking scholars tend to use (which I stupidly called “proper”), and I assumed the same applied to pitch. I also forgot to specify that I meant reconstructed pronunciation.
I’ve only been at greek for a bit over two weeks! I’ve just started learning and am trying to practice my pronunciation. I’ll take your advice and stick to a single approach - I was just hoping to get going with the standard pronunciation that scholars use. Thanks for the resources!
I plan to work with Koine texts to a lesser extent than with Attic texts, and a few closely related other kinds (e.g. Herodotus).
The closest thing to a standard for academic pronunciation of Attic Greek is described in Allen’s Vox Graeca. Schools in the UK have been following a “scientific pronunciation” that more or less conforms to it since the end of the 19th century. This replaced an 18th-century pronunciation scheme called “Erasmian” which was was reasonably accurate in Erasmus’ day, but lost accuracy in English-speaking countries due to the great English vowel shift.
(Here’s an American explaining the great English vowel shift with a Texan accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOfYck3J3e0)
A copy of Vox Graeca (it’s written in English despite the Latin title) and the resources at forvo.com are a good start to Greek pronunciation. But make sure that you listen to British BBC pronunciations, otherwise you’ll get into trouble with ω and ο! We Americans pronounce “father” and “saw” differently, and Allen uses these as demonstration words.
Randall Buth has been a big proponent of “spoken Koine” in recent years. This pronunciation is a modern Greek pronunciation with some vowel quality modifications, taken from Horrocks’ description of 4th century A.D. Koine.
And then there is modern Greek, used by many. The unfortunate thing about modern Greek is that the dozens of vowel quality distinctions maintained by the ancients (of both length and quality), have collapsed down to 8 in modern Greek. Length distinction has completely disappeared and many vowels sound like word “E” from the English phrase “the letter E.” This is known as iotization.
The quality collapse in modern Greek makes it impossible to tell important words like “you” (ὑμεῖς) from “us” (ἡμεῖς). The quantity collapse makes it impossible to read Greek poetry. On the other hand, many people have no trouble with using the Modern or Buth/Horrocks pronunciations for reading the Bible or later Greek Patristic writers.
The pitch accent is a more complicated subject. Pitch accents are difficult. You can look up videos of foreigners speaking Japanese or Norwegian to verify this to yourself. Also, properly reconstructing a pitch-accent is impossible. While we know (through a glass darkly) the word-level pitch properties of ancient Greek, we don’t know the phrase-level properties. Classicists tend to either use stress like the modern Greeks do (and in fact Allen suggests doing this) or make bad attempts at pitch. Personally, though I am no classicist, I make bad attempts at pitch. The stress accent, I have found, tends to interfere with poetry.
Diphthongs are complicated by the presence of glides, and it’s worth reading the chapters on Allen for information here. The only real question in long diphthongs. Allen suggests to drop them entirely, as Greek did sometime after the second century B.C., but many of us attempt them on various schemes.
The following video is my own attempt at the alphabet. (This is after about 4 years of Greek study and reading Greek aloud, so it represents a beginner’s attempt to give you an idea rather than anything authoritative):
The alphabet video is iambic verse, each line a repetition of three “di-dah di-dah” segments. In English poetry we do “unstressed-stressed” for the “di-dah” metron, but the Greeks did “short syllable-long syllable.” The pitch accent (which I attempt, but badly, as mentioned before) would matter for the tune if it were sung, but does not affect the rhythm of the verse.
I would love to revive this thread to try to gather more good audio and video recordings of Ancient Greek for Wishfulcrystal, myself, and anyone else looking for resources(any sort of pronunciation).
Lately I’ve been trying to memorize excerpts of Homer (beginning with Iliad 1), in order to gain a more musical understanding of the poetry. In this quest, good recordings, though few, have been the utmost help. I’ve had to find most of these on my own, however, and most databases seem out of date.
I would love to eventually compile an easily updated and shareable list of good audio and video recordings of Ancient Greek. The idea would be to let Hellenists hear for themselves what sort of pronunciations are being used, and work on their own.
With that in mind, I come to you: Please share any good (free) recordings, or sources of recordings you might have of Ancient Greek which might be helpful for your fellow συμαχοι in learning Greek.
I’ll get started by sharing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmW2T8OGDNM. So far, it has been the most straightforward metrical recording I could find of Iliad 1, without the bells and whistles of background music, κτα. The pronunciation is probably akin to what most Americans learn (pretty close to W. Sidney Allen’s Vox Graeca, I think with a couple exceptions). No pitch accent. Along with being a fairly long recording, this makes it very didactic and memorable for an American (though maybe a little dry).
Another note: I realize that as soon as recordings are brought up, the question of pronunciation is soon to follow. While I would love to hear your comments on different resources, I would rather (and love to) have the discussion of “correct” pronunciation elsewhere. Please keep this thread to resources and comments on the resources.
Thank you in advance, and I will try to share some more of what I’ve found soon.
Welcome.
I’ve been pleased to discover http://juliustomin.org/ recently.
Do people think that Tomin’s Iliad is a good model for someone who doesn’t want to attempt to deal with pitch accents?
In fact, Tomin is the only person I’ve ever heard who is both consistent on the stress accent and vowel length. Usually stress accent people murder short stressed vowels – you can’t tell their ό from their ω from their ῶ – but Tomin does not. Maybe because he is Czech? He is not quite as good as Lombardo, however, at bringing out the meaning of every word, but he’s pretty good.
However, I did have to use VLC to convert his WMA files to mp3 so that I could listen to them on my phone.
#!/bin/bash
vlc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC'
for ff in $(ls *WMA); do
echo ${ff%%.WMA}
$vlc -I dummy ${ff%%.WMA}.WMA --sout="#transcode{acodec=mp3,vcodec=dummy}:standard{access=file,mux=raw,dst=./mp3s/${ff%%.WMA}.mp3}" vlc://quit
done[/pre]