So, what would be the duration of the vowels ε, η, ο, ω…?
Well, this seems to be a silly question…but i have a point here. So, your opinion is welcome.
ok, le me give a push for talking.
It’s widely admitted that ε [e] and ο [o] are “short”, while η [ee] and ω [o:] are “long”…
So, if we make a convention and represent the “short” duration of ε and ο as…let’s say “1”, how should we represent in the same terms the long ones (η, ω)? Perhaps as “2” or…“1,5”?
And if so, how this can be reflected on the meter?
That’s a good question, one M.L. West devotes some time to in his book Greek Metre.
In languages where vowel length is contrastive you have everything from about 1.2 on the low end, up to 2.0 or even a bit longer on the other (to say nothing of a very few languages with extra long vowels). Given the behavior of Greek verse, and the statistics of other languages, 1.7 - 1.9 is a good likely range for vowel length in classical Greek.
Hmmm, so if we were to represent the word…μένω, in those conventional terms of duration, we could do it as 1-1.7 (or 1.9) right?
But what happens when it comes to diphthongs as in βο?λομαι?
What could be it’s representation?
if we accept that in classical greek the quantity of the long duration is one (let’s say 1.7) the representation would be 1.7 - 1 - 1.7 and thus admitting that diphthongs in classical greek are long. Hmm, but what makes dipthongs so special (when it comes to length) and different from a collocation like εα (as in δέλεα?)? Apart from the fact that diphthongs are defined as the combination of α,ε,ο, with the semi-vowel ι, in terms of length, is that 0.3 that makes the difference (if we say that two collocating short vowels require twice the time of a single short, thus 2x1 =2)?
I hope that my words are not hard to follow. One could believe that through time one thing that hardly changes is the sense of rhythm (there are a lot kinds of rhythm of course, but kinds). Afterall, metrics are based in the modern conception of rhythm, if there is a modern conception of it…
In terms of metre, I think that we have to presume a certain amount of “range” in the actual time it takes to pronounce things. After all, all heavy (or “long”) syllables are treated the same, whether they contain a single long vowel, a dipthong, a “long diphthong” (with subscript iota), or a vowel of any length followed by a consonant. Presumably a syllable with a long vowel ending in a consonant took longer to pronounce than a syllable ending in a short vowel or a syllable with a short vowel ending in a consonant, but all were treated the same. Off the top of my head I would guess that all short syllables (containing only a single short vowel, not ending in a consonant) would presumably have taken the same amount of time to pronounce, though.
No, the reason we don’t treat εα as a diphthong is because it is two syllables. δέλεα? has three syllables total. (If you’re a native English speaker you will probably find it easiest to pronounce the hiatus between the epsilon and the alpha either by inserting a slight glide (“y”-sound) or a glottal stop between the vowels.)
One of the points of my posting was to question whether there is much to be gained by trying to imagine the exact timings of short vowels, long vowels, diphthongs, etc. It’s not an exact science.
My main point was this: YES it is certainly true that the ancient Greeks (and Romans, and Indians, etc.) clearly FELT a distinction between short and long vowels in a way that we do not, as speakers of modern English (or modern French, Italian, Spanish, or Greek, for that matter) do not. (What is taught in schools as “long” and “short” vowels in English has nothing whatsoever to do with duration.)
HOWEVER, it would appear that the only SALIENT difference that the ancients perceived was that between a SHORT vowel/syllable (one mora) and EVERYTHING ELSE (more than one mora). Judging at least by metre, the ancients apparently did not notice the difference in duration between, say, an open syllable containing a long vowel/diphthong, or a closed syllable (i.e. one ending in a consonant), whether it contained a long or short vowel. Either that, or they noticed the difference but did not consider it important.
Furthermore, they considered all syllables ending in a short vowel to be short (or light), regardless of how many consonants it began with. This is particularly noteworthy given that sometimes the same cluster of consonants with which a syllable begins could, at the pleasure of the poet, “make position” with the previous syllable to make it closed and thereby heavy (or long), or not. So again, EXACT duration is not the issue.
(Terminology: princeps is the required long position in hexameters; -uu-uu- has three principes.)
Homer allows himself certain licenses in different positions in the hexameter line. For example, sometimes he may stick a light syllable (i.e., short vowel in open syllable) in a princeps position. However, though we may speak of two contracted positions being equal to a single long, there is nonetheless a mismatch between 2 and 1.8. When Homer puts a syllable in a contracted position, that syllable must be indisputably long — the contraction is already a strain on the rhythm.
That’s what i’m trying to say…If we assume that rhythm is quite “strict”, ans specific, then when should we really use the notation _ for long syllables even if they are long vowels “2” or diphthongs “1.8” in that case, if we represented a meter on a music sheet, it would give us something solid. But was it really so?
But would it serve any purpose? I don’t see how. Poetry isn’t normal language, and it’s no surprise that timing would be brought into regularity for verse, especially since so much early Greek verse was sung or chanted.
There are living verse traditions that are also quantitative (Arabic and Persian, several in India and Africa). Nothing about Greek quantitative verse is surprising.
But was it really so?
Are you leading somewhere in particular with this line of thought?
Of course, i’m not questioning of the musicality of classical greek poetry. On the contrary. Afterall i mentioned musical “terms”. What i am trying to say is that when trying to replace for example short vowels with a sixteenth (conventionally) note and respectively the long ones (vowels or diphthongs) with eighths, i usually get odd results concerning the meter,(see it in a music sheet) as long as i treat diphthongs as something less than twice a short. I’m also into music and all this is just an intuition. And that because nowadays having we can use (at least greeks) all syllables either as short or long, when singing. But the ancients seemed to do the same thing preserving the properties of the vowels. i hope you know what i mean.
and the point is that does the current belief on meter really reflects the rhythm back then?
Like I said: the ancients only seemed to recognize a distinction between two and only two lenghts: the short syllable (a syllable that you can represent with a sixteenth note), and everything else – which you should be able to conventionally represent with 8th notes, regardless of whether they consist of a single long vowel, or a diphthong, or a vowel followed by a consonant. In my opinion, there is no reason for a dacylic hexameter to come out with “odd results” on a musical sheet: it should be a very regular rhythm all the way across the line, which the equivalent of 12 eights notes in every line. The Hexameter was the most perfectly regular of all meters, where the rhythm isn’t based on strict count of syllables but on strict “length” where, as I have said, length is defined as [±short open syllable].
It is possible to represent other, less purely length-based meters with musical notation, but then you have to keep changing the time signature throughout the line. For instance, the first line of a sapphic stanza can be analyzed as having five bars, the first and the fourth having three beats, and the rest having four beats:
which from the point of view of Western music, is a very irregular rhythm (though it is a rhythm one can definitely train oneself to hear, even if one comes from a Western musical tradition, by using techniques like this).
The hexameter by contrast is perfectly regular all the way through: four beats per measure, uniform. You just have to accept that to an ancient Greek or Roman, all non-short syllables “felt” the same, and just give them all the same duration.
Amazing how much one learns about languages in general by learning a (very) foreign language.
I had never noticed this difference between Dutch and English.
There does not seem to be a lot of difference in vowel length in English but Dutch does have this feature.
Kook (cook- the verb) takes at least twice as long to say as kok (cook- the noun).
The same with mak (calm) and maak (make).
Hmm, so by accepting this, tha same time i accept that ,at least in dactylic hexameter, there was no length duration between diphthongs and long vowels, not even that 0.2 we talked about before…
I don’t know what – if any – difference existed between long vowels and diphthongs; what I’m saying is that even if there was a difference, it was not an “important” one, at least for metrical or musical purposes. The ancients seem to have felt a strong difference between short syllables on the one hand and long syllables on the other. They don’t seem to have paid attention to the relative lengths of different LONG syllables, at least for the purpose of creating a rhythm in their poetry. If one had been able to be there to measure the duration of long syllables in carefully-recited (or sung) poetry, then yes, I’m sure that some long syllables would have been longer than others, and perhaps there might have been a 0.2 difference between dipthongs and long vowels. But for the purposes of their poetry, the only difference that mattered was that between short syllables on the one hand and long ones of whatever length on the other.
ok but in this case i think that the stringency in duration is not well preserved, since they didn’t care on those tiny differences between long vowels and diphthongs…and pronounced both with the same duration…
Well, maybe. As I mentioned earlier, the smallest usual ratio between short:long vowels in other languages is about 1:1.2. That means that .2 is about the limit of hearing for most people at normal speaking speed.
And I’d emphasize one more point — people rarely speak normally when reciting verse. That very artificiality (that’s sort of the point of verse) allows one a little room to adjust sounds in a way you’d never do in speaking normally. Especially in sung verse.