About the acute accent

[Dong]

I'm learning the ancient accent and there is something confusing me a lot. I'm a beginner to ancient Greek and I'm reading the book "Greek, an intensive course". In that book, there are three pitches. But I listen an audio recorded by Stephen G. Daitz and it sounds like there are some conditions that a syllable is pronunced with a lowing pitch, like the word "λόγος"(and I find there's actually NO grave mark in Daitz's literal material).

So if there's an acute mark does it always mean a rising pitch? If the answer is "No", why not using a grave mark instead of an acute mark ?

Thanks in advance !

[ailuros]

greetings,

sorry for such a late reply to your question. as a beginner, perhaps you should not be too conerned about pronunciation at the pitch level, if that makes sense. i have little knowledge on this particular topic, but accents and other marks were added to the texts by later editors (i.e., the authors did not themselves use them in writing), and how exactly spoken ancient greek sounded remains a subject of debate. i don't want to discourage you from pursuing a worthy topic, but at this stage in your learning it may be better just to make sure that you understand the basic rules of accentuation rather than how the accent markings related to spoken pitch. also, others disagree with daitz's pronunciation choices, so it may not be good to get too fixated on one system of pronunciation only. hope this is helpful.

[Timothée]

The written accents are quite late, but there is little doubt that they very faithfully represent the ancient spoken system. You can trust them. (There'll be some doubtful details, but you needn't focus on them at all at this juncture.)

Different people who are reconstructing Greek will necessarily differ in details. You may want to listen to Stefan Hagel, too, for comparison. It's free on the Internet. The Chinese, for instance, will have a slight edge here as they can produce the tones quite naturally as these elements are found in their mother tongue (rising for acute, rising-falling for circumflex and falling [or instead rising but not as high as acute??] for grave). The same goes for the Swedes and Norwegians, as well.

Some reconstruct the acute as rising a third. It's of course impossible to know exact details; as is often repeated, we would need tape recordings. The impossibility of attaining definite results doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't try our best. Other people on the forum will be able to provide more information on this subject.

[Dong]

Sorry for not replying on time and I even don't know if I need to reply or not. According to Chinese Internet custom, I think I'd better to express my thanks.

Once I have thought the accent is very important for a beginner. (And it's awesome, isn't it ? ) Now I got to know that I really have no reason on bothering about such things. It may probably be that I misunderstood the lecture in types. Maybe I should listen to them again.

And yes... the Chinese language we speak also has musical pitches, which are steady, rising, falling-rising and falling and almost all the syllables has a pitch, (because there's just one syllable per character) but it still sounds quite different from the ancient Greek.

(Sorry for confusing you if you found some words from this post are "strangely used". It's my first time for posting in English(or actually "Chinglish"). Since I don't know how to reply a reply, I just press the "POST A REPLY". )