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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. -}
Culled from classics.log9308b
Copyright © 2001 David Meadows
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