Re: Hellenish oddities

On Tue, Nov 21, 2000 at 09:04:36PM -0500, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
[snip]
> So, Greek's weird; some points:
>
> * the stress pattern seems so horribly chaotic to me; 3-4 syllable words
> could have the stress just about anywhere, first and ultimate syllables
> included. Reading two long words in a row with their stresses on opposing
> ends feels really spooky to me.
Attic Greek is pitch-accented. At least, that's what most scholars agree
on. Reading it as a stress accent certainly makes it sound strange! :-)
(although AFAIK modern Greek is stress-accented... but then, sounds have
changed since ancient times, so it's hard to say.)

> * what's with the bulky diphthong endings?
English tends to avoid long sequences of vowels; many languages do just
fine with them.

> * what's with initial [ps] and [ts]? Even worse, initial [zd]!
To non-English speakers, initial "str" is just as strange (as in,
"strange", pun intended). :-)

> * Those initials are nothing compared to the [p^ht^h], or later [fT], in
> words like 'phthong'. That word has in fact become a fashion word among me
> and my linguistic friends, for being the most ridiculous syllable we know
> of (though with heavy competition from Icelandic [vErmstl^0]).
I personally find [kt] stranger (also in Attic Greek).

[snip]
> * languages with a flair for the middle or passive voices aren't
> necessarily strange, but Attic Greek's really taking it far, IMO! After the
> book introduced the middle voice and deponent verbs, I've hardly seen a
> single new active verb. Just about any verbal concept seems to have its
> deponent verb; wonder what this love of passiveness says about the Greek
> mindset.
Bzzzt. Middle voice is *not* passive... in fact, AFAIK, pre-Attic Greek
didn't even *have* a passive voice, just middle. Also keep in mind that
deponent forms are only middle in *appearance*, but always active in
meaning.

Of course, what appears to you to be a proliferation of deponent verbs may
merely be a side-effect of the textbook author trying to get you used to
seeing them; doesn't necessarily mean they're that common in the language.

> * just like Icelandic (which I wouldn't claim to be any more "normal"),
> Greek likes to have verbs taking dative and genitive for no apparent
> reason. Well, of course there's an explanation, but it's still a silly use
> of cases.
Ha! Yer ain't seen nuthin' yet... wait till you see *my* conlang's case
system!!! *evil grin* >:->

> Okay, so today I read through a course for Modern Greek, hoping to get to
> know some juicy sound changes and simplifications of morphology. Well, now
> it really got spooky! Apparently, 2500 years of sound changes seemed to
> yield only this, in my quick glance:
>
> * all diphthongs simplified, a record number merging with /i/ (I read 11
> somewhere, probably including vowel length).
Yep... AFAIK, eta, upsilon (both long and short), and various diphthongs
involving epsilon and iota are now [i] or [i:];  alpha-iota which
supposedly was [ai] is now [E] (or [&]?), etc..

[snip]
> * only one row of stops retained, /p t k/; voiced and aspirated rows
> becoming voiced and unvoiced fricatives.
You know what, I've been noticing this phenomenon: it seems that aspirated
stops (or aspirated anything, in fact) have a tendency to lose their
aspiration and fricatize. Is this a common phenomenon, or am I just
deluding myself again? :-)

> * a few final n's dropped.
That was already happening in Attic Greek, with those "movable nu's". I
suppose now they just completely dropped, instead of re-appearing at
certain places. (I don't know modern Greek, though, so I might be totally
off here.)

[snip]
> * chaotic stress pattern remains; perhaps I just fail to see the pattern in
> it.
Of *course* there's a pattern to it!!! For (most) verb forms, the
rules are:
- push the accent as far back as possible (ie., antepenult if possible)
- if the last syllable is long, the accent is "pulled back" to the penult.

For nouns, every noun has a "preferred" accented syllable; but if
inflection changes the length of the vowels, then the accent might move.
Again, if the last syllable is long, the accent is "pulled back" to the
penult.

Of course, you also have the proclitics and the enclitics, which throw a
big monkey wrench into the works... but I'll save that for someone more
qualified than me to explain :-)

[snip]
> In any case, to explain my ranting on bad language courses above, I really
> didn't trust that Modern Greek book's representation. 'When it just doesn't
> seem realistic', I think to myself, 'the book's gotta be lying'. That is to
> say, the books don't always represent the realities of everyday speech. I
> won't believe today's Greeks say [psi] until I hear them say it. The book
> was written by a Greek, and I hear they're very prescriptive over there, so
> I'm not sure what to believe...
Umm.... "psi" is pronounced exactly like that: [psi]. You might regard
that as strange, but as an L2 English speaker, I can tell you how strange
"str", "nct", and many others, are in English.

> BTW, they don't want to be called 'Greeks', right? Perhaps we should be
> politically correct and call them "Hellens", or even "Eleni", and call the
> language "Hellenish" :) Just a thought.
Uhhh... you're gonna hear a LOT from them about this one... prepare to don
your flamesuit! :-)


T

--
Why is a river rich? 'cos it has two banks.