Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

Here you can discuss all things Ancient Greek. Use this board to ask questions about grammar, discuss learning strategies, get help with a difficult passage of Greek, and more.
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ἑκηβόλος
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Re: Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

daveburt wrote:Aren't iota subscripts irrelevant to pronunciation?
Pronuncing or speaking a dead language out loud is about fun and personalising the experience we have as learners of the language. The make-believe world of creative anachronism allows entry into what might have been the world of the speech community of a language. Without it, those dead languages become pretty encoded puzzles in funny scripts and characters - and there are people who read dead languages more than adequately without ever seriously trying to speak or pronounce them. For example, almost no Egyptologists attempt anything other than a conventionalised pronunciation of any period of the language before Coptic, but still have a deep understanding of the language, and are able to produce accurate and readable translations.

If your system of pronunciation only has one or two lengths for vowels, then the iota is rightly written subscript and left unpronounced. What I mean is that in a system where short and long are differentiated, the omicron ("ο") is short, while the ("ω") is long and the diphthong "οι" is long too, but how about this diphthong, "ωι"? Is it tripple length. In a system that is binary, there is no tripple length. Was the iota of "ῳ" and others ever pronounced? Probably, yes.
daveburt wrote: ... if I start paying attention to prosody, the bar will be getting higher!
Sorry to say, with prosody, there is only so far that you can go before it becomes guesswork. As with every type of guesswork, the more educated it is, the better it is. If you have a grammar (morphosyntactic) and discourse aware analyses to support your choices of prosodic features to use, and you use them more or less consistently, your TTS or even just reading. If somebody was to read, just getting the sounds right, without the mind engages in both understanding and analysis, it's probably going to sound strained or distracted. Reasonable standards to judge reading by are clarity, fluency, expressiveness, beauty, as well as the ones that more robotic TTS engines are capable of.
Last edited by ἑκηβόλος on Wed Nov 08, 2017 4:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

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ἑκηβόλος
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Re: Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

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jeidsath wrote:Most telling, to me, is that the ability to write quantitative poetry with few errors seems to continue for centuries. While an educated, Atticizing Greek, was a real phenomenon, it's hard to imagine an educated class recovering the prosaidic features of Attic Greek to the extent necessary to do write quantitative poetry without errors.
Thinking about how it happened and what happened in fact is like wondering what would have happened if the bus moving away from the clock had met some speedhumps (traffic inhibitors) as it approached the speed of light. If languages change at a rate of 70% every 1,000 years, but due to separation from the general flow of time and change, the rate of change can vary, so if the lyric tradition came back to be compared to the developmental continuum of the venacular, it would appear conservative, or was it itself naturally conservative?

I find the accurate retention of the awareness of vowel lengths an interesting question to ponder sometimes.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

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Re: Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

Post by jeidsath »

While the Lorentz transformations would apply to linguistic change as they do to all other changes with time, the ancient Greeks were not in fact moving very fast, compared to us, relative to the speed of light.

However, someone clearly needs to write out the theory of Relativistic Linguistics to complement Paul Krugman's 1978 paper on "The Theory of Interstellar Trade." There are actually some interesting scenarios that you could spin out: what would linguistic change look like if you had two communities moving apart from each other at at 90% of the speed of light, broadcasting television at each other? Etc.
“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

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opoudjis
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Re: Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

Post by opoudjis »

ἑκηβόλος wrote:If languages change at a rate of 70% every 1,000 years, but due to separation from the general flow of time and change, the rate of change can vary,
Ah, good thing you put in the proviso. Glottochronology is based on some quite dodgy use of statistics, and the variability of rate of change was already demonstrated in 1962.

Greek has certainly been quite conservative in its language change since Koine; the language of the church has been a major reason why, just as universal literacy has been in Iceland. But that particular conservative force wasn't around before the church was established, of course, or before the Atticism it emulated arose, as a reaction to that very language change.

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Re: Audio for Classical Texts in Demotic

Post by ἑκηβόλος »

opoudjis wrote:
ἑκηβόλος wrote:If ...
Ah, good thing you put in the proviso.
Yes, αἴκε.
τί δὲ ἀγαθὸν τῇ πομφόλυγι συνεστώσῃ ἢ κακὸν διαλυθείσῃ;

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