|
| greek
accents |
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
John Peradotto
Subject
Greek Accents
Now
I know I'm going to rile some traditionalists with this one, but --
oh hell! -- here goes. We have had much discussion on this list
about Greek fonts -- which ones are the easiest to use, or how to do
what with any one of them. Let me raise an argument I have had with
several of my colleagues for years, decades actually. Why do we
continue to print and (except perhaps at the graduate level) to
teach Greek accents? What purpose do they serve that matches in
utility the expense in mastery? >From a purely practical point of
view, many of us know that, coming when they do in the first-year
course, they gag a not insignificant number of students who would
otherwise stay the course. (And don't anyone say ``if they don't
have the fortitude for accents, we don't need 'em.'') I should like
to challenge anyone out there to present a bit of text in which the
presence of an accent mark resolved an ambiguity not otherwise
resolvable from context. I've never seen one. And then think how
many of our word-processing font problems would disappear to free
our minds for more serious issues.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Daniel Ridings
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I
was, not too long ago, inclined to agree with you and I took up the
same discussion at my department. I was young, and green, ... and I
learned to shut up and bite the bullet. There are several ancient
manuscripts which managed just fine without accents. There's hardly
_any_ manuscript that follows our rules. There actually is a
beginners book in classical Greek which refuses to use accents. I'm
not sure, but I think it is in the "Teach yourself"
series.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Tony Keen
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Well,
when I was a lowly undergrad, I was under no compulsion to use
accents in my written Greek proses (though I did, because I wanted
to show off), and received no instruction in how to do so (I studied
thoroughly Abbot & Mansfield, and found the basic rules fairly
simple), so in terms of teaching it's no longer a *sine qua non* in
all UK institutions (though I wouldn't be surprised if Oxford and
Cambridge still insist on it - anyone with a working knowledge of
Greats care to enlighten us?). I don't know, however, that I'd like
to see accents disappear from printed text. After all, it would
probably be easier to use oe and ue rather than o-umlaut and
u-umlaut rendering German. But it isn't correct, is it?
>
I should like to challenge anyone out there to present a bit > of
text in which the presence of an accent mark resolved an >
ambiguity not otherwise resolvable from context. I've never >
seen one. Since the accents were added centuries later than the
actual texts were written, this is hardly surprising. > And then
think how many of our word-processing font problems > would
disappear to free our minds for more serious issues.
And
think how much extra time we'd have if we didn't bother with such
things as spelling, proper grammar, correct transliteration (he says
having just looked at yet another anglophone document that mentions
the non-existent author `Thukydides'), etc. Sorry, but if we're
going to do this, let's do it properly. (Anyway, we'd only find
something else to get worked up about.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From Tony Keen
Subject
Greek accents
I've just had a word with my colleague Simon Northwood, who is doing
some undergraduate proses as part of his graduate work, and he tells
me that he's not under any compulsion, and apparently that even in
Greats proses accents are not necessary. It surprises me then that
US universities are still pursuing something that even Oxford has
abandoned.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Virginia Knight
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I got through Greats at Oxford quite happily in the early 80's
without knowing about accents; I didn't do prose composition, but I
think those of my friends who did didn't have to put the accents on.
When I went to Cambridge as a research student, I decided this was
something I needed to get to grips with and went to a series of
three lectures on the subject; there were no equivalent lectures at
Oxford.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Daniel Ridings
Subject
Re Greek accents
Well,
not only the US. Greek without accents is unthinkable in Sweden. A
first-termer can miss a couple accents on the exam, but too many
will be punished (we have a wicked teacher for the beginners).
Date Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
R.A.S.Seaford
Subject
Re Greek Accents
An
easily overlooked, certainly non-traditionalist argument for
printing accents is this. It is absurd for Hellenists not to know
modern Greek (because ancient and modern Greek are basically the
same language), and the accentual system has remained pretty much
the same (though of course differe nt in pitch/stress). This is just
one respect in which knowing modern Greek br ings ancient greek to
life.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"C.G. BROWN"
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I suppose that J. Peradotto is right in saying that there are few
places where accents are decisive in determining meaning, although
they are useful in deciding whether verbs like *meno* are present or
future (context is not always helpful in such cases). Having
admitted this, however, I would die defending the writing and
teaching of accents. There are a couple of passages of unaccented
Greek in Bernard Knox' Dead White European Males book, and I was
struck by how unpleasant it was to read them. They are part of the
complex of visual signs that we use to construe Greek. Following
Peradotto's argument, we might advocate doing away with writing
Greek in the Greek alphabet. After all, this would be a great boon
to many DOS-bound individuals, whose computers speak only English,
and it would make the prospect of studying Greek more appeal to many
of our students (I have often been amazed by the irrational fear of
the alphabet!). In fact, why bother our students with Greek at all,
when there are translations available... I guess that I'm a
traditionalist. BTW, I loathe transliterated Greek. I have just been
reading Carpenter & Faraone, *Masks of Dionysus*, which prints
lots of bits of Greek in this way in the notes. I have trouble
reading it (I need that complex of visual signs), and can't figure
out who is served by this sort of practice. The typographers? Can
anyone explain?
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Daniel Ridings
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Well, they have gone over to a monotonic system. Classical accents
are no longer considered a requirement for correct orthography. But
still, I want the accents. One thing to remember is that if there
are certain cases where accents remove ambiguity, they cannot be
trusted. A modern editor has put them there. He has decided how such
ambiguity is resolved. The decision isn't sacred.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"Gary R. Brower"
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I whole-heartedly agree. I recently reviewed a book which contained
loads of transliterated phrases. And I was incensed by the time I
finished. Anyone for whom the transliterated "original"
would be helpful would probably find the Greek characters even more
so. Plus, given the number of transliteration schemes, who knows
what the original was? As to why? I imagine its either the
publishers and/or the typographers. They probably can't understand
the alphabet, so how do they know if they've type-set it right.
Grump, grump, harumph.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
WEBB DENNIS W
Subject
Greek Accents
As
someone who studied Greek at university 20 years ago, I am surprised
to hear that today some departments don't teach the accents. How do
introductory students learn where the stress should be in the
nominative singular of a noun, for instance?
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"David N. Wigtil"
Subject
Re[2] Greek Accents
Naturally
the matter of how to implement the pre-403 Attic alphabet should be
included in this Greek accent discussion, too (!). But the Western
print tradition is with us even more firmly than the Western writing
tradition, since most of our reading over the past few centuries has
been typeset. Since that tradition has virtually frozen English
spelling at a stage from before the Great Vowel Shift, has left
final silent consonants everywhere in French, among countless other
anomalies, it is doubtful whether any but the most isolated systems
of print or writing or the most terrible of social upheavals--such
as Turkish move from Arabic to Roman letters in this century, or the
Rumanian switch from Cyrillic in the 16th (?) cent.-- will be
changing soon. And since ancient Greek has a reading audience that
doubtless has a wider geography and greater "internationality"
than modern Greek (though this may not be true in actual numbers of
readers), the use of accents certainly has a huge inertia among all
those who have mastered them to any degree and will be about as
difficult to dislodge as the previously mentioned example of German
umlauted vowels.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Virginia Knight
Subject
Re Greek Accents
A
lot of people are not taught to pronounce Greek with the stress on
the accent. In England, at least, it is common to stress Greek as if
it were Latin - a deplorable tradition in my view. A former classics
teacher I expressed this opinion to winced and, quoting a line of
poetry with the stress on the accent said 'That's not poetry!'. But
I'm sure most pronounciations of ancient Greek, including his own
would have sounded unpoetic, indeed barbaric, to a native speaker.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Tony Keen
Subject
Re Greek Accents
>
But still, I want the accents.
Me
too, at least when it comes to proper research work. Undergraduate
teaching is another matter (as anyone who knows my views on the
importance of language teaching for undergrad ancient history
courses will realize).
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From John Peradotto
Subject Jots & Tittles [formerly Greek Accents]
C.G.
Brown writes I suppose that J. Peradotto is right in saying that
there are few places where accents are decisive in determining
meaning, although they are useful in deciding whether verbs like
*meno* are present or future (context is not always helpful in such
cases). I would urge that any decision regarding the tense of *meno*
would be made by an editor, and that either on the basis of context
or arbitrarily. Brown further There are a couple of passages of
unaccented Greek in Bernard Knox' Dead White European Males book,
and I was struck by how unpleasant it was to read them. I agree. I
find such things unpleasant too. I guess I'm just trying to weigh
the worth of that feeling. Brown further Following Peradotto's
argument, we might advocate doing away with writing Greek in the
Greek alphabet. I haven't advocated that, but I wouldn't die
fighting to resist it. Brown further In fact, why bother our
students with Greek at all, when there are translations available...
Whoa! I think there's fallacious logic there. But to set the record
straight, let me say that I support the teaching of Greek, literacy,
the democratic way, and moral rectitude.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Jim Helm
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Then,
of course, there is the view (widely held, I thought) that the Greek
accents were pitch accents, not stress accents. Some of my students
actually try to produce the pitch accents! Exotic... But presumably
sound is another reason for learning something about the accents
(and not just "sprinkling them in, like salt and peppah",
as I heard they do in Britain). We teach what we know about the
pronunciation of ancient Greek in part for the benefit of reading
poetry, even though we are not absolutely sure what ancient Greek
sounded like. We do the best we can, thanks to Stanford et al.
Besides, the accents aren't really _that_ difficult.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"C.G. BROWN"
Subject
Re Jots & Tittles
If
an editor were to make a decision about the tense of *meno* (as
indeed he or she must), how then would that decision be communicated
to the reader without accents or bothersome footnotes? The issue of
accents concerns not only editorial decisions, but the convenience
of readers. The `fallacious logic' was deliberately so, but bad
logic occasional plays a role in the development of curriculum.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
gregory crane
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I
can't come up with many earth-shaking examples of accent-determiend
texts, but I did have the experience of teaching second semester
Greek after someone who ignored accents. It was painful trying to
explain why a contract was an imperative rather than a 3rd sg, for
example, without recourse to accents. Having started out
good-natured and easy going, I found myself teaching the troops
verbal accents midway through the semester because I couldn't stand
talking down to them all the time and letting the squiggles on the
page be riddles. Maybe the squiggles should be left out, but if they
are there, its problematic leaving them out. As the typos here
indicates, I am not a stickler for detail in general, but sloughing
over details in Greek tends to be a process rather than a
deliberative act, and sliding over the accents is, in this regard,
pedagogically a tricky task.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"Daniel P. Tompkins"
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Why
in this discussion has noone mentioned the tapes of Greek texts read
with all the pitch accents but not much feeling by S. Daitz? Some
years ago the linguist Ron Zirin of SUNY Buffalo argued,
interestingly, that you normally don't have pitch without stress, or
stress without pitch. I've never seen this case presented or
cnsidered elsewhere, but it strikes me as intuitively correct. Any
comments?
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From John Peradotto
Subject
Re Greek Accents
A
personal note. As a callow youth with a lot of Latin, but no Greek,
and a strange (for my age) interest in philosophy, I was taught
Greek from Schoder and Horrigan. Accents were ignored. The payoff?
We were reading Homer -- I mean *real* Homer before the end of the
first semester. (Thank you, Jesuits. You cared more about me, the
student, than about your precious scholarly careers. Hard to find
that attitude around much anymore.) OK? Think about it. Josephine
Blow, forty years later, in a far tougher age for young folks, shows
up in my basic Greek class, her head full of alternatives to the
study of Greek. Don't ask me what brought her there. (It might have
been the only course available at the only free period in her
schedule.) But she's fairly bright. Can't decide between
engineering, biology, or (she dare not tell her Dad this)
literature. Do I follow the paradigm that energized MY education and
turned my career in a different direction? Do I get her to Homer or
Herodotus or Sophocles (not Xenophon, guys, give me a break!) as
fast as I can? Or do I teach her Greek accents where the tradition
and the textbooks oblige me to do so, waiting for, dreaming about
those precious few whom some random accidents of history have
destined for the study of Greek, no matter how hard I make it for
them? Sorry, folks. That's no choice. Homer may start a fire ablaze
in Josephine's gut and later, maybe, make her hungry for the
accents, wanting mastery *etiam in minimis*, and that's as it should
be, but vice versa? I don't think so. Not for more than one student
picked out of a hundred. And if Josephine never takes another course
in Greek, she has, well, read Homer. Alright? If the study of
classics has taught me anything, it is the concept of *kairos* the
right move at the right time. It is mistakes of timing and priority
that make species and professions extinct. And if anyone thinks this
is an argument against rigor, I would say, with all due respect,
they have made one of those mistakes.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
"C.G. BROWN"
Subject
Re Greek Accents & Josephine Blow
I'm
sure that most classicists worry over the J. Blows of the world;
many of our best and brightest students have fallen into Latin and
Greek by accident. But I confess that I don't think that we are
doing anyone a favour by playing down things like accents. Quite
simply, they help students navigate the Greek, if the students have
been taught the basic principles. Moreover, it also seems the case
that those students who are taught to ignore accents at first always
have a harder time picking them up later. So if Ms Blow decides to
devote her life to Greek, she will have to work much harder later
on.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
"David N. Wigtil"
Subject Re[2] Greek Accents
Hasn't
anyone studied any Japanese or Chinese or French? Looks like such an
argument would either have had to be quite intricate, or else quite
blinkered. My small experience with Japanese and Mandarin is that
they handle pitch tone (and vowel length, too, in Japanese) as
phonemically distinctive, as ancient Greek, but not stress (also as
ancient Greek). I would commend Japanese also as a live example of
stressing and emotional inflexion done with particles rather than
with stress or pitch (again, rather hellenikwi tropwi).
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Barbara Rodgers
Subject
Re Greek Accents & Josephine Blow
Accents
and Homer are not incompatible in first year Greek. When I did
beginning Greek at Brown (with Chase and Phillips) and needed an
extra course second semester, Alan Boegehold (will probably not
remember that he) thought it was an excellent idea to take the Homer
course at the same time as Greek 2. It was real Homer, too, five
books of it, and Homer definitely made Greek 2 worth living through.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Robin
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Jack
for the second day running you've touched one of my fave pet greek
peeves; Xenophone. Nobody, but nobody, learns greek to read
xenophon. That classics depts continue to subject second year
classes to it when Plato and Herodotus are available I'll never
know.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Tony Keen
Subject
Re Greek Accents
>
A personal note. As a callow youth with a lot of Latin, but > no
Greek, and a strange (for my age) interest in philosophy, I > was
taught Greek from Schoder and Horrigan. Accents were > ignored.
The
payoff? We were reading Homer -- I mean *real* > Homer before the
end of the first semester. This seems fair enough. For beginners I
don't think accents are really necessary; get them reading the
language first. I still think eventually they ought to at least get
a brief gist of the rules (at graduate level, if not before), but I
agree that at least this way for more of them there'll be a later. >
(not Xenophon, guys, give me a break!) Why not? Okay, there's lots
of boring bits in the _Anabasis_ and the _Hellenika_, but there's
some pretty good bits as well (at least in the former; as one who
has enjoyed the sensation of coming over the crest of a hill to see
the ocean spread out before me, I know exactly how the survivors of
the 10,000 felt); and what about the _Cyropaedia_?<<*>>
Lots of long speeches, I'll admit, but some fun bits, especially the
pastiches of Socratic dialogue ("So, Hystaspes, wouldn't you
agree that...?" "Yes, Cyrus." "Ah, but that
means..."). * Sorry, slipped into a Latinization there, as I
tend to do when the direct transliteration actually makes the name
sound strange.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
MALCOLM HEATH
Subject
Re Greek Accents
>
I should like to challenge anyone out there to present a bit of text
> in which the presence of an accent mark resolved an ambiguity
not > otherwise resolvable from context. I've never seen one.
There's
a declamation theme turning on accentual ambiguity in Hermogenes
Peri Staseon 41.16-20, 91.1-2.11 Rabe (cf. Cicero De Inventione
2.118). Is it otherwise resolvable from the context? Both litigants
claim that it is - but they resolve it in contradictory ways.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Virginia Knight
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Apologies
for reposting this if it has already gone out. I can't recall
receiving a copy myself, but it may be my faulty memory. A lot of
people are not taught to pronounce Greek with the stress on the
accent. In England, at least, it is common to stress Greek as if it
were Latin - a deplorable tradition in my view. A former classics
teacher I expressed this opinion to winced and, quoting a line of
poetry with the stress on the accent said 'That's not poetry!'. But
I'm sure most pronounciations of ancient Greek, including his own
would have sounded unpoetic, indeed barbaric, to a native speaker.
Date
Thu, 12 Aug 1993
From
Michael Halleran
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I can't resist saying something about Greek accents, even though
many good points have already been made. Accentuation, whether
pitch, or in the later period, stress, was part of the fabric of the
language. The accent marks were not, but didn't need to be. Why not
teach our students this part of the language? I've always thought
that the accent rules were never very difficult (most textbooks, to
be sure, do a positiviely dreadful job explaining them). Perhaps it
was just my good fortuen to learn Greek from Bill McCulloh, who
boiled down the essentials to three simple rules, and I have taken
the same approach with my students. I simply don't belive that
learning accents and getting to Homer (or whoever) quickly are
incompatible.
Date Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Rudolf WYTEK
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Dear Accentrics, I'm just closing down for 4 weeks of vacation in
Austria and I can't follow your always enlighting discussions for
some time. So in an mildly hypomaniac state of mind I decided to
express mild astonishment about this accent discussion by telling
you my story I began Greek at school with approx. 15 and I remember
clearly that we all expected to begin with three weeks of
introduction into Greek alphabet etc. We took it somewhat from our
experience with shorthand writing I think. The 'professor' entered
class, wrote the Greek letters on the blackboard, explained a
little, each of us had to read an example and he ended his first
lesson with 'Tomorrow all of you read and write Greek.' and so it
happened more or less (some were even after 3 months unable to sing
out the Greek alphabet). And accents were the same, it took the next
two lessons and surely a lot of exercises, but no barrier at all.
Now my questions Was this an effect of young age? the very strict
professor (we secretly called him Dr. Mabuse|)? or should this be a
happy quality of Austrians? I think you lay much to much weight on
this little problem at all. And Greek without accents, e.g. the
Rosetta stone, looks always a little derobed (if this word exist). I
like accents, and I use them in French and Serbocroatian, why not in
Greek?
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Donald Lateiner
Subject
Re Greek Accents
To
Michael Halleran Would you post Bill McCulloh's (Ohio Wesleyan
graduate and Rhodes Scholar as well as all around bibliomane) three
simple rules of accentuation? I agree with your point that learning
the rules is not so bad; I would add that students who see accents
and are not taught are likely to feel second-class. But Chase and
Phillips' ultimate sentence on p.4 remains my favorite example of
shooting oneself in the foot.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
"R. C. Ketterer"
Subject
Gk acc--
M.
Halleran My own feeling is that accents need some sort of
explanation and demystification at the beginning or the students
will just be asking you what all that stuff over the words is,
anyway. Could Michael Halleran share his three simple rules or is
that an old family recipe kept within the phratry, deme or whatever?
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Luci Berkowitz
Subject
Re Greek Accents
The question of whether or not to teach Greek accents seems to arise
with almost quinquennial regularity, and it seems to come usually
(pace Jack Peradotto and others) from those whose teachers had a
hard time mastering the rules and therefore wanted to spare their
own students. That may be a euphemistic way of saying that their
teachers didn't know how to recognize the rules and their value.
Here is a tiny example from an author that most Classicists couldn't
give a hoot about, Cedrenus, a twelfth-century monk from
Constantinople, presently undergoing verification and correction at
the TLG. A member of the TLG staff found the reading spermati sou
with an acute on the epsilon, an acute on the iota, and a circumflex
on the upsilon. Was Immanuel Bekker (Cedrenus's editor) having it
both ways? Or was the publisher (Weber of Bonn) slipping? Was there
some obscure rule that crept into existence between Aristophanes of
Byzantium and the nineteenth century to allow this anomaly? Unless
our students are treated to the rules (and they really aren't that
difficult), they couldn't possibly appreciate, or even recognize,
the norm, the exception, or the oddity. Why would we deprive
them--except that some of us haven't mastered accents? Finally, if
we don't pass along the rules for accents, the next generation will
have no way of teaching them to the generation that follows. Sooner
or later, we'll have scholars looking at texts with accents and not
knowing how to question editorial decision.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
WEBB DENNIS W
Subject
Greek Accents
Let me second Tony Keen's defense of Xenophon's Anabasis. The first
real Greek I read (my second semester) was Burnet's Plato, which I
found difficult and only mildly interesting. The Anabasis was like a
breath of fresh air. It isn't difficult to deal with, you can keep
moving right along, and it's a great adventure. I read through the
entire work and enjoyed it immensely. How do Greek students today
find the Anabasis as a first reading course? (To further condemn my
literary tastes, I also read through the whole of the Gallic Wars
when learning Latin and enjoyed it, though less than Xenophon.)
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Clifford Marcus
Subject Re Greek Accents
I
never bothered with accents either, until my first Greek comp
assignment in a grad course came back. Every accent had been
studiously added in red and a corresponding percentage deducted from
my grade. My only gripes were A. There were other more important
things for me to master. B. Why make all the fuss about the accents
when no one makes the slightest use of them for pronunciation
purposes, which is what they were originally for.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Daniel Ridings
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Students?!
What about us poor sods who have to teach Xenophonie. I went so far
as to try and argue for Isocrates. At least he "keeps to the
grammar books." Everyone moaned ... but they don't have to keep
reassuring the students that there is something else around the
corner. Our first term students start out with Xenophon. As soon as
they get up their routine we, and I, switch them over to Plato ASAP.
We usually read Crito. Just as a curiosity. We are always being told
we (the younger generation) are getting dumber by the day. "When
I studied Greek, we memorized the Iliad by heart" and that kind
of thing. Our first term students have to read 70 Teubner pages of
Attic prose. They can choose whatever they like, but if they are
smart they choose the texts we read during lessons, that way they
can bite off pages at a time rather than giant chunks. We usually
recommend Xenophon (I don't) and then Plato, Crito or the Apology.
How do we compare? It's not right to compare with American
universities for the simple reason that our students study nothing
else but Greek. We can, and do, demand at least 40 hours a week of
them. They don't sit in class more than 6 hours, the rest is used
for preparations. The joke, though it is a sick humour --- because
it is usually true --- is that the only day we have to give them off
is Christmas Eve. I would like to hear from others, in particular
our German members.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Daniel Ridings
Subject
Re Greek Accents
The Anabasis was like > a breath of fresh air. It isn't
difficult to deal with ... >
Well,
I don't know about that. Forget the accents, they are no problem,
but on the very first page of our student edition of the Anabasis
there are 5 occurences of <'ws, none of which share the same
meaning, and the final <'ws is something you really won't be
seeing that much in other texts. Now that is a problem. The content
is a matter of taste, but I would like a text which doesn't offer so
many samples from the fine print of our grammars. It's easier on the
beginners.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From Joel Lidov
Subject
Isocrates, accents
As
a beginning graduate student, I found a course in Isocrates one of
the most valuable I took. Moses Hadas had scheduled it - he had an
interest in what were ranked as second-string writers (that included
Apuleius as well as Lucian in those days) - but he died over the
summer and Jim Coulter taught it with an emphasis on I's relation to
Plato. One value was purely practical you can learn to read great
gobs of Isoc (in fact, you have to); what other author can you
practically skim over? But I. also provided a good background for
the concerns and intellectual habits of the Greek world in the Fifth
and Fourth Century. Its true that that background is valuable
because we have the other authors to study and to read more slowly,
so that it doesn't say much for Isoc. himself, but the course left
me with some admiration for I.'s attempt to draw the strands of
poetry and oratory and philosophy together despite the deficiencies
of the actual intellectual content and the hypnotic consistency of
his language. And of course, it's always worth remembering how
important he was to the Romans and later Elizabeth I practiced Greek
translating Isocrates. I've taught from Shoder and Horrigan; it
seemed to me it left the students in limbo. I hate accents, but I am
increasingly convinced that they are part of a structure that
allows, even incites, the best students to master the language in
detail, and to care about it. The best solution is probably to make
them available from the start but use only gentle pressure in trying
to insist on them.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug Date Fri, 13 Aug 1993 2
From
"Barry Powell, Classics"
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Greek
accents are of course also non-classical--I mean can we date the
system we use before 800 A.D. or so? It's a Byzantine system and a
Byzantine tradition.
Date
Fri, 13 Aug 1993
From
Barry Powell
Subject Re Greek Accents
I don't imagine that an ancient Greek would have understood even one
word pronounced by a modern according to the system we are taught in
school. Sure, it's a fantasy, but it keeps us employed.
Date
Sat, 14 Aug 1993
From
Michael Haslam
Subject Re Greek Accents
I look in after time out (being unable to keep up with the volume on
a regular basis), & this is what I find. > Greek accents
are of course also non-classical--I mean can we date the system we >
use before 800 A.D. or so? It's a Byzantine system and a Byzantine
tradition. Sure it's only with the advent of minuscule that
people took to actually *writing* all the accents, but the accents
were always *there*, and could be represented in writing at will.
The system was set out with amazing thoroughness by Herodian in the
2nd cent., using much older tradition. The case for learning them,
I'd have thought, would be fundamentally the same as for learning
the accentuation of Latin, or vowel quantities -- they're part of
the language system, accessible to native speakers but not
alphabetical ly to us. Admittedly you don't need to know them in
order to read verse (not so for Latin), or for any purpose other
than understanding how the language works. BTW, I'm with r.thomas
all the way (well, nearly all the way) on Vergilian punnery. It
belongs in a context of etymology (philosophically systematized by
Stoics, see Varro), crossed of course with hellenistic aesthetic.
Date
Sat, 14 Aug 1993
From
Carl Conrad
Subject
Re Greek Accents
I've
missed this discussion while it was at its most active because our
main Bitnet link out of St. Louis has been down for the better part
of two days, but the experience cited by Rudi Wytek (with whom I've
been corresponding off the list with immense delight almost daily
for the last six weeks) prompts me to relay one of the most
embarrassing experiences of my life I submitted a seminar paper to
Rudolf Pfeiffer in Munich and got it back with only two lines of
comment "Es ist klar, Sie haben die Akzente nie gelernt;
entweder keine oder alle, und zwar die richtige!" I never
really learned the accents properly until I started teaching Greek,
which was, of course, a few years after my Munich embarrassment. I
think it's clear, however, that frequently they aren't taught
effectively precisely because teachers have the ambivalent feelings
regarding their real worth that we have see expressed in this
discussion. As for the claim that written Greek looks "wrong"
or "incomplete" without the accents, isn't it interesting
that this anachronistic device, supposedly first developed to
indicate how Greek had been pronounced in _olden days_, i.e., how it
was no longer pronounced, should have rooted itself so deeply, that
we are scarcely conscious that most of the literature we are dealing
with must originally have been written without the accents. Or have
I misunderstood what we are told about the development of the system
of accents by the grammarians?
Date
Sat, 14 Aug 1993
From
"Daniel P. Tompkins"
Subject
Re Greek Accents
> > I should like to challenge anyone out there to present
a bit of text > > in which the presence of an accent mark
resolved an ambiguity not > > otherwise resolvable from
context. I've never seen one.
There's a declamation theme turning on accentual ambiguity in >
Hermogenes Peri Staseon 41.16-20, 91.1-2.11 Rabe (cf. Cicero De >
Inventione 2.118). Is it otherwise resolvable from the context?
Date
Sat, 14 Aug 1993
From
"Daniel P. Tompkins"
Subject
Re Re[2] Greek Accents
Nice
point. Chinese, with tones but not pitch accent, doesn't count, does
it? The point about particles is important to make, and there is
that argument that Gk has so many because it didn't use pitch to
establish emphasis. I guess we could think ourselves into a state in
which we used pitch w'o stress. It seems hard.
Date
Sun, 15 Aug 1993
From
john foley
Subject Re Greek Accents
Like a few others I missed some of the earlier conversations about
accents, but thought it might be worthwhile to throw a possible com-
parand into the ring. The language we hesitatingly call Serbian and
Croatian (the hyphenate having been rendered altogether impossible)
is the only contemporary Slavic language to preserve a tonal system.
Tones are lexically assigned, with six possibilities for the
combination of vowel length and tone short falling, long falling,
short rising, long rising, short unmarked, long unmarked.
Morphological variation can include modification or relocation of
nominative assignments. For me the most interesting feature of this
system is that it is crucially complicitous in the prosody of the
epic. Notwithstanding Jakobson's pronouncement in 1952 that the epic
decasyllable "tends toward a trochaic pentameter" (an
imported verse-form at odds with the history of the line; and "tends"
takes a healthy bit of latitude to implement!), the descasyllable
can be clearly explained by a few rules involving tone/length
combinations. Unfortunately a possible linkage between such patterns
and the music (both vocal and instrumental) that accompanies them
has not been undertaken. The South Slavic *lexical* system of tones
occasionally does help to eliminate ambiguity; "sam"
unmarked = "I am" while "sam" with long falling
= "alone," e.g. But these are largely manufactured
problems that do not arise in real-life use of the language,
especially among native speakers, so I am told. And the diacritical
marks associated with the various combinations are never written in
mss. or printed in books; one has to get a special dictionary, a
_Pravopis_, even to look them up. Words in natural context cooperate
in relieving any ambiguity simply by their mutual interactions.
Date
Mon, 16 Aug 1993
From
Fred Beihold
Subject
Greek Accents et al
Insofar
as it is the primary purpose of language to communicate, which I
represent by one to one mapping to possibility, and since few if any
ambigui ties arise without them, one must conclude that the Greek
accents are not essential. However, from the standpoint of not
loosing anything that was there at the language's inception, for
poetry and so forth, it is fortuitous indeed that the system of
markings has been developed. It's like the fly fisherman who used
only natural imitation lures. It's part of the enjoyment, and if
people don't learn a language for enjoyment, or a sense of
accomplishment at least as part of the reason, then I don't under-
stand something about the fascination. Originally I was in favor of
doing away with all greek accents, but now I see that something
rather intangible would be lost without them.
Date Mon, 16 Aug 1993
From Michael Halleran
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Since several have asked for Bill McCulloh's boiled down rules on
Greek accents, I'll post them, but without better graphics (ie the
accent marks and macron marks, etc.), they may not look very good
(or even comprehensible). (Please excuse the brackected annotation
instead of these marks.) They do not account for everything, to be
sure, but for the beginning (and pre-enclitic) student they cover
most of the bases. After a brief description of accents (including
the fact that they can appear on only the final three syllables of a
word), come the following rules, illustrated with examples VERBS The
accent on verbs is (almost always) RECESSIVE it goes back as far as
it can go (up to the third-to-last, antepenultimate) syllable. If
the ultima (final syllable) is long, it will be on the penult
(second-to-last syllable). If a verbal form has only two syllables,
the accent witll be a circumflex on the penult only when that
syllable is long and the ultima short; otherwise it will be an
accute. 1. S[with an accute]SS[indicated as short] [arrow pointing
both ways to indicate the reciprocal nature of the rule] SS[with
accute]S [with macron] 2. S[with macron and circumflex]S[indicated
as short] [same kind of arrow] S[with acute]S[with macron] NOUNS and
ADJECTIVES The accent on nouns and adjectives is PERSISTENT it stays
on the syllable where it occurs in the nominative singular, unless
it is "forced" to move by the following rule 3. S[with an
acute]SS[indicated as short] [arrow pointing only towards the right;
this is not reciprocal] SS[with an accute]S[with macron] When the
accent falls on the penult, rule #2 obtains. [A sentence on the
grave follows. --okay, that's rule #4] Hope this helps those who
asked.
Date
Sun, 15 Aug 1993
From
David Sider
Subject
greek accents
Late to the discussion as usual this summer, let me cite Heraclitus'
pun on *bi'os* and *bio's*. And, Jack, do you also prefer your
Hebrew and Arabic unpointed?
Date
Wed, 18 Aug 1993
From
John Peradotto
Subject
Re Greek Accents
Dave Sider wrote Late to the discussion as usual this summer,
let me cite Heraclitus' pun on *bi'os* and *bio's*. And, Jack, do
you also prefer your Hebrew and Arabic unpointed?
Dave,
the pun on *bios* works perfectly well and is clear from context
without any printed accent (though it is an intriguing question how
it would have been pronounced). As for Hebrew and Arabic, I have
none to prefer, but it looks like a question that is different in
kind and not just in degree. How about a little test for all list
members who have ever taught Greek? (1) What is the commonest error
your students (at all levels) make? (2) What is the least
significant error they make? I'll bet the answer to both questions
is the same. As for Ted Brunner's reading of the *Tyrannus* without
the pi's, I loved it! It's so much more beautiful. There is, don't
you think, something rather disgusting, at least aesthetically
inferior, about an unvoiced labial plosive. I'd suggest only one
improvement let's revive the practice of a fairly early system of
writing and mark with a grave accent every syllable not marked with
an acute or a circumflex. That way, no one would be left in the dark
about what to do with unmarked syllables. And we should definitely
allow editors to add (especially in Plato) an irony marker, e.g.,
-}, wherever he deems it appropriate, as we apparently find it
necessary to do in this forum. -} |
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classics.log9308b
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