Grave accent

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ivan
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Grave accent

Post by ivan »

How do you usually pronounce words having grave accent? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_accent it means absence of accent. (eg. "τὸν ἀδελφόν" would be then read as /ton adelpʰón/). Should there be a small pause between "τον" and "αδελφον", or "τον" should be pronounced as proclitic (/tonadelpʰón/)?

But then, what about longer words and sequence of grave accented words: "τοὺς ἀγροὺς θεραπεύομεν"?
It sounds weird to me to pronounce those words without any accent, just like /tuːs agruːs tʰerapeúomen/, or connect it all together /tuːsagruːstʰerapeúomen/.

How would you pronounce it?

Timothée
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Re: Grave accent

Post by Timothée »

You will definitely want to read words in a Greek sentence with liaison, i.e. bound together in quite continuous flow which obfuscates (to some extent) the word boundaries we see in our printed books. This liaison will somewhat resemble that in Italian or French, but differ from the English way. This hardly restricts the stress to be on only one syllable of a sentence or syntagm (except in case of enclitics and proclitics), although we may guess that one syllable could have suprasegmentally been a pinnacle in a sentence.

I don't think there's scholarly consensus of how grave accent was pronounced. Some seem to think it is merely graphical phenomenon for acute, but this seems unsatisfactory. Perhaps it was slightly lower in tone than regular acute, but still a little heightened compared with unaccented syllables? Allen discusses phonological and phonetic matter of Greek and Latin (and Sanskrit) in his books, though I myself have yet to absorb many things he says.

Thus, in τὸν ἀδελφόν, uttered [to-na-del-pʰon], τὸν still probably had an accent of a kind, whilst in ὁ ἀδελφός [hoʔadelpʰos] (or do we want to use κρᾶσις to get rid of the unpleasant hiatus?) ὁ apparently was truly unaccented.


I have heard some people question Allen as already slightly outdated, but am still not aware of much that would replace him. As to Latin, I've seen a reference to Luciano Canepari, and could actually here ask if someone has read his take on Latin pronunciation and what it's like.

ivan
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Re: Grave accent

Post by ivan »

So, in other words, grave should be (or could be) interpreted as a middle tone, lower than acute.

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jeidsath
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Re: Grave accent

Post by jeidsath »

Allen describes the Greek pitch accent as a rise immediately followed by a fall. The rise is marked (acute), but the fall is generally not -- except in the the circumflex accent. After the fall is a return to normal pitch. This explains the mora-counting rule for accent.

In an oxytone followed by a non-enclitic, ie., ἀγαθὸς ταμίας, there is no room for the fall after the accent on ἀγαθός. Some modification to the acute had to be made, and in writing this was marked with a grave accent, but according to Allen "it must be admitted that the nature of the modification is unknown, and there seems little point in making mere guesses."

In a footnote, Allen says that he's really not adding anything to C. Lancelot's 1655 Nouvelle Méthode pour apprende facilement la langue grecque.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

Timothée
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Re: Grave accent

Post by Timothée »

We get some support from the relics of ancient Greek sung music (these have to be approached with utmost care). What little remains thereof has apparently

a) never lower note on the grave accent (= oxytonon followed by non-enclitic) than elsewhere in that word;
b) the following word's accented syllable and the syllables before that are not lower than the syllable with gravis

The song will naturally often somewhat distort the "normally" spoken line (Probert likens it with opera singing), but being too far from the regular will not be euphonic anymore but forbidding, so there was probably some correlation between spoken and sung word.

You probably can tentatively think of gravis as middle tone, as long as you understand that it was allotonic (does this word exist? it does now at least) to oxytonon (i.e. not tonemic).

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