Ancient Greek accents in ten rules | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Greek accents in ten rules

antigonejournal.com

122 pointsamanuensis49 comments

When I had to write Polytonic Greek, I had to write my own vim plugin that would transliterate on demand. For instance, while in insert mode h''als<alt-g> turns into ἃλς.

It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us, but we should not forget that the words with different accents sounded differently, so it was probably not confusing to native speakers. Moreover, every language has its homophonies (the English "Dick" is not just a first name), and many near-homophonies for strangers (Japanese untrained ears can't distinguish "r" from "l", and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words).

A nitpick about the article: a paragraph about the other main diacritics would have given more context. The breathing marks chang the pronunciation as much as the accents did. And since Roman languages are not tonal languages, they kept the breathing as a "h" but dropped the tones.

> and I can't identify "o" from "a" in most Russian words

Unaccented "o" and "a" are exact homophones, Russian children are trained in school to memorize the spelling in order to differentiate between the two.

They may well be exact homophones in some/all dialects of Russian, but I'm not sure that children having to memorise spellings is evidence for that. Don't both English and German, for example, have almost-homophones that children typically learn to distinguish by learning the spelling rather than by hearing the subtle difference in pronunciation? If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word?

I suppose it's an interesting phenomenon that some (but not all?) languages have subtle phonetic differences that even native speakers cannot always easily distinguish.

> If you look at the spelling mistakes made by 12-16-year-olds in England and Germany, don't you find a significant proportion of them are caused by the child having incorrectly heard how people pronounce the word?

I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography.

E.g. take the example on page 2 of http://www.edu.lmu.de/lbp/personen/wiss_ma/eckerlein/seminar... : LOITETOTSUFARENiSTLBÖD. In Standard German, that would be "Leute totzufahren ist blöd." Except for switching L and B, the original isn't wrong about the pronunciation: <eu> represents [ɔʏ] and <z> represents [ts], so using <oi> and <ts> instead is perfectly reasonable.

It doesn't seem perfectly reasonable to me. Using "totsufaren" instead of the correct spelling because the 't' sound is already in 'tot' destroys consistency with hinzufahren, auszufahren. And I'm not convinced that 'oi' and 'eu' represent the same sound in German, since 'eu' is a diphthong and always sounds long, whereas 'oi' is a short vowel followed by a glide: [oᶦ].

> I don't know about England, but I think in Germany it's more common that children represent the pronunciation accurately, but are "corrected" by adults who want to enforce the standard orthography.

Represent the pronunciation accurately, or the children's pronunciation accurately?

It's a bit more interesting in English because a common mistake in English is to pronounce a word as it's spelt. For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent ... OK, that's me being prescriptive, but well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove.

I suppose parents and teachers have different incentives here: parents want their children to resemble them, make a good impression, and sound educated; teachers want the children in their care to get good marks in written tests and exams.

Knowing how to spell diarrhoea is less important nowadays in real life, because of computers. If you don't want to look stupid you still have to know it's guerrilla marketing rather than gorilla marketing, though. Computer will tell you how many Rs in guerrilla.

> Well-educated older speakers hear younger people pronounce the T in often and they disapprove.

If you are going to teach the hoi polloi to write, and make an issue over spelling, this sort of thing seems predictable, though two centuries seems a long time for it to become noticable.

I love the term "the hoi polloi." Yes, technically the English word the is redundant (because the Greek word hoi is also "the"). But the redundancy makes the term more-quickly understandable. From a UI/UX perspective — with the correct primary goal being not slavish brevity but service to the reader — here the redundancy is a good thing.

(Cf. "ATM machine.")

Yeah, my pet theory is that English has naturally evolved to repeat the last word of acronyms to disambiguate them.

For example, the T in often is supposed to be silent

That's funny... I always considered (and pronounced) the t in often as a (or something close to a) thorn. To me, the sound is in between official and oven.

Quite the opposite, there are some dialects (e.g. Vologda dialect) where they are pronounced differently, there is a term for that, it's called "о́канье". But the norm is that a native speaker can't differentiate between the two unless he/she has other clues apart from the sound of it.

I can imagine you can detect slight unconscious difference that an educated native speaker introduces by means of computer analysis of sound samples etc., but it's not a phonetically significant difference for a human.

Well, you can very often deduce which one it is from cognate words, or general language patterns, so it's not just rote learning.

e.g. this random headline from Pravda today:

"Байден намерен обсудить поведение России на встрече с Путиным"

NAMEREN - obviously a, since NA is a common prefix

OBSUDIT' - obviously o, since OB is a common prefix

POVEDENIE - obviously o, since PO is a common prefix

ROSSII - hopefully you can spell the name of your country...

or if you don't know how to spell OPRAVDAT' (justify) which has its stress on the ultimate syllable, you just need to recall the name of the glorious newspaper above, PRAVDA, where the stress is on the first A.

or GOROD is easy to spell because -oro- is a very common cluster.

Many thanks for this. Yes, a fuller article would make mention of 'crasis' - where two successive words are melded into one utterance - which inevitably affected pitch and accentuation. As to breathings, their affect on pitch (as opposed to pronunciation) was null: the rough was a mere aspirate, and the 'smooth' was in effect the absence of any aspirate. Latin, as a fellow Indo-European language, had inherited initial aspirates, although these were fewer in number than in Greek, where rho and upsilon always had initial aspiration, and where Indo-European s- had become an aspirate (compare Lat. serpo with Gk herpo, or Lat. sal with your Greek hals.)

> It's okay to laugh at the ancient Greek and its words that look similar to us

I never laughed at this, it's not strange that there are words or word forms where the only difference is a single phonetic feature, or indeed where there is no difference at all. As you say that is the case in all languages.

And regarding accents in Greek, I don't recall encountering any case where the position of the accent was the crux. Which isn't really surprising given that the texts didn't have accents originally, so the writers couldn't rely on that alone.

In Classical Greek, it isn't just the position of the accent that matters but the kind of accent there. You are right that the Greeks themselves did not need the accents notated, but students of Greek today often rely on the accent to tell e.g. the eta or eta+nu words apart.

Sure, I took 6 full-time terms of Classical Greek so I'm familiar with the different accents.

But my Greek studies took place 20 years ago so I do wonder what you mean by eta and eta + nu words? Are these different subtypes of the third declension?

Eta alone can mean ‘the’, ‘she who’, ‘either/or’, ‘indeed’, ‘than’, or ‘I was’, with the accent helping to narrow it down. Eta+nu is ‘her who’, ‘he/she/it was’, etc.

Also, for example, tau+iota is either an interrogative or an indefinite pronoun, and it is the accent which tells you which without having to scan further through the sentence.

Ok, I thought you were talking about word endings.

Well sure, there are minimal pairs, but most of the time it’s immediately clear from the context, and we have to keep in mind that the accents were added much later by modern philologists, so they have de facto been deduced from the context.

But sure, there goldilocks zone where it’s not obvious to the lay reader, but the scholars are pretty certain what it should say, and then it helps. I wouldn’t say it’s a major struggle when reading Greek though.

Even accounting for tonally differentiated words, Mandarin Chinese is rife with exact homophones. Shì can be “is,” “try,” “thing,” “kind/style” and many more. It amazes me how we are able to pattern match so well provided a little context.

Indeed.

For an extreme example, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short poem in Classical Chinese in which every word is pronounced shi when read in present-day Standard Mandarin, with only the tones differing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Ston...

A philologist I know who likes teaching ancient languages actively just prefers to practice saying the words with rising (acut) or falling or rising and following (circumflex) pitch Yes, that does not explain why they are where they are, but ancient Greek has enough rules to memorize before you can read it! https://twitter.com/growe0/status/1401380230590132225

Thanks for sharing this. Antigone runs open-access articles on anything to do with the Greeks, Romans and what the world has made of them since. We are committed to two things: opening up Classics to as wide an audience as possible, especially autodidacts who could not study the subject at school or college; and having no paywall, no paid susbcription and no profit motive. If you're interested to see what we've run in our first few months, please take a look at https://antigonejournal.com/articles/ If you think you could have a piece to write for us, see https://antigonejournal.com/contact/ And if you can face the world of social media, we can be found at https://twitter.com/AntigoneJournal and https://www.facebook.com/antigoneclassics/ Thanks for all of your interest and apologies for such a straight-up post.

Is the musical about Greek accentuation, mentioned in footnote 25, still on Kickstarter? I couldn't find it.

We never found it either - so there's a danger this may be a joke!

You have broken my heart.

I have some questions!

(1) Rule #2 describes particles that do not have enough phonological weight to carry an accent of their own, so that they combine, for pronunciation purposes, with the word that follows them.

Rule #10 then describes particles that display the identical behavior, except that they combine with the preceding word instead of the following word.

To me, those would both be called "clitics", the term I know for a word which is phonologically dependent on another word while being grammatically independent. You name the second group as "enclitics" and have no name for the first group. Do you see them as being different phenomena? Why treat them so separately?

(Actually, #2 appears to include #10 in that it mentions "a word that has two accents at different places", while the only example of such a thing arises from rule #10.)

(2) I wanted to think of the accent location as being sensitive to morae rather than syllables. But the examples clearly show that while a long final syllable will drag an antepenultimate accent forward, a long penultimate syllable will not. Might you be able to talk about why that is?

Thanks for these questions. (1) The cases under rule #2 are a mixture of proclitics and common words (such as the two conjunctions and the adverb ou). Most proclitics (including most prepositions, and most forms of the definite article) in fact do keep their accent, so a general rule can't be given. Since enclitics do follow set rules, which are much more complex than simply not having an accent, they are given their proper treatment separately in the last (and most tricky) of the rules!

(2) Analysis by morae, whereby a short syllable counts as one mora, and a long syllable as two, generally allows the rule that an acute cannot go back more than four morae, and a circumflex more than three morae - but you still have to deal with the fact that, as you say, a final long restricts an acute to three morae from the end, and face the exception given in n.13. So we decided to avoid it entirely!

Is there a trend of written language simplifying over the ages? (Greek and Chinese examples come to mind). Is there an objective way to measure / rank script complexity? Assuming its true, is it correlated with more people becoming literate over time (hence simplifying the educational process)?

Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years but that is because of the very nature of the script. though I would agree, when it comes to Indian languages and their scripts, the symbols dont look any simpler but people tend not to use the entire set of consonant and vowel symbols available to them and only stick to using the simpler ones and likely the ones closer to English. another thing that I notice is that newer words don't have consonants followed by two or more consonants, the new words tend to look like stream of syllables with simple consonants followed by vowels.

I would like to register my scepticism that Indian languages have not changed their pronunciation over multiple millennia.

My wife had a professor from India who spoke Hindi as a mother tongue. His wife, also from India, also had Hindi as a mother tongue but was from a different village. The couple spoke only English at home because it was the only language they had in common. You do not get that kind of mutually-unintelligible divergence unless the language has had changes in pronunciation, and profound ones at that.

It's quite possible that among a small subset of elites that languages have remained unchanged, but I think even that is highly unlikely. The Latin spoken by the educated elites of Europe at the time of the renaissance would have been unintelligble to someone on the streets of the eternal city during the republic. I suspect that such an assertion that the languages have remained unchanged for millennia is just simply not backed by facts.

> Indian languages havent had any change in their pronunciation in the last 2000 years

This is an ideological belief -- it is not even a theoretical possibility.

The Greek alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and the fact that it replaced the local writing and spread quickly suggests that a simpler technique of writing can win. I think the trend you see is the most common behavior.

But the evolution of written languages is not a simple process. It is often influenced by political choice. E.g. Hangul for Korean, simplification laws in Germany or France.

I can think of few exceptions where the simplification of a written language was rejected. The Sumerian ideograms were simplified after their introduction circa -3300. The writing system was adapted to the Akkadian language which was the dominant spoken languages for centuries. It mixed pure ideograms with double readings and syllabic symbols (a bit like Japanese). But after 900 BC, when neo-Assyrian ruled, Akkadian was declining, as well as writing on clay. There was a clear tendency to complexify the tablets: for example adding more symbols or reviving archaic expressions. Akkadian was the language of the elites, and simplifying it would "degrade" it.

Disclaimer: I have been interested in ancient writings, with a particular attention to Mesopotamia, but I'm not an expert.

We can see a similar drift toward complexity in the written language by looking at text messaging in the modern day. The old system was that e.g. "before" was written "before". Now it might be written that way, or it might be written "b4". The second form is easier for the scribe, but requires a lot more knowledge on the part of the reader. The shorthand, which makes things difficult for the partially-educated (such as foreigners) is a result of mass literacy. If text messaging had been restricted to formal elite-to-elite communications, they would have gone on writing "before" the same way they'd been doing it all along.

I suspect something similar contributed to the trend you describe in Akkadian texts; with Akkadian in decline, the only people using it would probably have been more familiar with it than average. And that familiarity would let them use it in ways that wouldn't have made sense to a merchant's wife trying to send a letter to her husband abroad.

The accents (and word separations and upper case / lower case distinctions) were added after classical Greek had become a learned language like Shakespearean and KJV English is today. They helped people who spoke later forms of Greek pronounce old texts.

I work with a Greek lady, and tried to impress her with my Greek from Assassins Creed: Odyssey by saying "Chaire!" to her. Turns out it's archaic if not actually ancient Greek.

Good on you: it is perfectly fine Ancient Greek!

What kinds of sources do we use to determine how classical people said hello? Surviving plays? Correspondence? Speeches recorded in historical works?

Get W. Sidney Allen's slim text _Vox Graeca_. It goes over not only how Ancient Greek was pronounced but also how we know. The evidence includes explicit notes from grammarians and other writers, graffiti, borrowings, puns, and later forms of Greek. Allen also has another book _Vox Latina_ which does the same thing for Latin.

But I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.

Hello,

A good source would be epistolography, another would be narration of encounters.

> A good source would be epistolography

This one seems tricky. English letters do not normally begin with "hello", or even with any synonymous phrase. Instead, they use forms that are specific to written letters.

A good question. The best, i.e. least likely to be unreliable, sources are: epistles as preserved by papyri; conversations as preserved in ancient drama (especially comedy); phrase-books that survive from ancient school curricula; funerary inscriptions that use everyday language; graffiti.

Sometimes I ask Chinese people about referring to midnight as 子时. (First (子) of the twelve double-hours (时) that traditionally make up a day.) They find this hilarious.

My greek relatives would say eg. ‘heh-re-tiz-moose/chairetizmoos apo teen yaya soo’ (…trying to spell it there as it sounds, sort of…), meaning roughly: ‘(sending my) respects/greetings to your grandmother’, I’m wondering if it’s the same root? …If it is, I guess it could be interpreted as an extremely respectful way to say ‘hello’, or an archaic one I guess! :) …unless they were worried that your sleeve-dagger thing was about to make an appearance heheh… (‘hark! …hail to your grace, prithee salutations and felicitations to thou!/‘mistress, what cheer?’ or even ‘wes hail?’ :) In my experience, Greek people are usually quite chuffed if you go to the trouble of learning a bit of the language, even if you muck it up a bit, as not many people do… (…also there is the custom of ‘philoxenia’, which dates from ancient times, but still echoes today…)

Same root, indeed. And yes it would be extremely respectful. No one would have an issue understanding what you mean though. As you mention words with the same root are very common ( the root is for joy) and also it is used in expressions from ecclesiastical texts that are adopted as part of the vernacular.

Thanks cgio! The history of languages is fascinating: how they evolve, adapt and borrow from/influence each other… You’ve sent me down a rabbit-hole now reading about Byzantine/Koine Greek: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek

Most Greek in Assassins Creed Odyssey was archaic. I really enjoyed being able to appreciate the attention they showed on this aspect of the game.

Interesting. Would be cool to have audio clips for what it sounded like, especially with comparison to modern Greek (where possible)

This channel doesn't make the comparison and are short snippets from his full audiobooks, however its some of the best reconstructed ancient greek spoken by a specialist in this area

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv2q9OTZ0w4zCnt6NDjQZ-A

Reply on news.ycombinator.com