Re: an announcement...

That sounds like a lot of fun, though!  I made a hobby of trying to
get those things right pronouncing Greek, but nobody else in the
department much cared.

Have you heard the tapes by Stephen Daitz about pronouncing ancient
Greek?  He attempts to restore the tone accent, and all that, but for
heaven's sake, the man pronounces *English* as if he's a recent
immigrant from Planet Neptune.  His "restored Greek tone accent" is a
bizarre, surreal sing-song.

I find it much more likely that the tone accents are simple, modest,
up and down jumps, as in Navajo, not weird yodeling.  And that's how I
pronounced it.

Fun Trivia about Greek You Probably Already Know:

Very strangely from a typological perspective, ancient Greek seems to
have *reversed* the quality/quantity values for its E's and O's.  That
is, eta (long e) had the quality in English "Ed" (E:) whereas epsilon
(short e) had the quality of "a" in "rake." (e)  Similarly, long Omega
had the value of English "saw" (O:) while short omicron had the value
of English "hope" (o).

[O:] [o] [E:] [e] is very very weird.  [O] [o:] [E] [e:] is much more
common.

These quality-quantity combinations eventually disappeared, but they
were there from very ancient times until the Classical period.

Occasionally, there *would* be a need to represent [o:] or [e:]
(these sounds were uncommon but existed, mostly as a result of
contraction), and these were written with the so-called "spurious
diphthongs" (digraphs), "ou" and "ei" (omicron-upsilon and
epsilon-iota).  This is problematic for those of us who would like to
pronounce ancient Greek correctly, because there also existed genuine
"ou" and "ei" diphthongs, which were written the same way.

Oh, to top it all off, eta represented two different values too.  In
addition to [E:] it represented a long version of the "a" sound in
English "hat" [&:] -- this sound arose from a lowering of [a:] in
certain positions, most famously at the ends of words such as in the
first declension ending.

So Greek vowels are impossible to *really* pronounce correctly
without a very thorough knowledge of etymology -- you have to know
where the sound came from in order to decide whether, for example,
it's [e:] or [ei], [o:] or [ou], [E:] or [&:].


-----------------------------------------------
Boxcars are pulling an Ed of sorts out of town.
             edheil@postmark.net
-----------------------------------------------

Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
>
> > It makes complete historical sense, but to an innocent fellow without
> > much humanities background encountering Greek for the first time, it
> > can be a bit daunting to hear one pronunciation -- an accepted vague
> > approximation of the ancient one -- used in original language texts,
> > and another used in English.
>
> Oh, it can be far worse, I can assure you -- you might have to
> speak it yourself!  My Greek professor makes us not only
> differentiate between a very un-English voiced, voiceless
> and voiceless aspirated stops (/d/ for delta, /t/ for tau,
> and /t_h/ for theta), we have to get the tonal accentuation right,
> too! (We're graded on this, an Ancient language's pronunciation,
> surreally).
>
> Imagine some obscure Indo-Aryan variation of Hindi mixed in
> with an equally obscure Chinese dialect, and a drop of German
> consonant clustering for effect, and you can begin to visualize
> the oddity of it all...
>
> But it's an absolutely beautiful language!
>
> =======================================================
> Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
> ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
> Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
>
> Denn wo Begriffe fehlen,
> Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
>    -- Mephistopheles, in Goethe's _Faust_
> ========================================================
>