Re: Hellenish oddities

Ok, time-out, time-out, all of us.

This little posting of mine has been most seriously misunderstood. I felt
like flaming back, but this is just too much.

You see, I'm not a xenophobe. Nor am I a linguistic ignoramus. Nor a crappy
student who can't pronounce lots of "oddities". Somehow I touched a nerve in
people that made them want to get back at the linguaphobes out there.

All my careless ranting was really just about how some things in Greek don't
appeal to me. I love learning languages, I speak lots of them, and I'm fully
capable of pronouncing all of the "horrible" clusters mentioned. I was only
trying to appeal to people here who might have felt frustrated when learning
Greek. I'm not really having problems with the language, by all means.

As to the books I dissed, I understand (though I didn't mention it) that
they can't be all technical using only IPA. Sometimes I just wish they'd
more reliably present IPA *with* the approximations. Or perhaps if IPA would
be taught at school...

I know Greek had a pitch-accent, which is not instinctive to me, and that
using stress accent is incorrect and would therefore get you "spooky"
results. And that in the vast abundance of the world's languages, there are
plenty of languages more "spooky". And I do know middle voice from passive,
being a _native speaker_ of deponent middle verbs with active meanings.

However, I should have stuck to the only thing that I really do feel
"weird"; that's the development from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek, at least
what I've seen of it. Compared to changes in West European languages, there
seems to be so little in Modern Greek.

>What I'd like to see in a pronunciation guide, and haven't yet, is some
>brief discussion of the rhythms and tones of a language--paralinguistic
>features, are they called?  The *rhythm* of French, frex, sounds quite
>different from the rhythm of Korean or German, even if you're not
>listening to specific sounds--the ups and downs of tones.  Perhaps this
>is something you just have to pick up by ear, though.
I like this thought. I've only once seen this kind of description in a
guide, a very technical book on Icelandic. I liked that. But it's kind of
hard finding accurate linguistic terms to describe the "rhythm".

Anyway, no more of this, we should all get back to more productive
discussions :)

Óskar