Re: Stress placement systems

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 9/19/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>> 2. It is clear that ancient Greek words had *pitch* accent. The pitch
>> was:
>>   (a) *not* dependent upon syllable quantity, but *solely on vowel
>> length*
>
>
> I don't have my Greek grammars with me, but I seem to recall reading
> something about syllables which were "long by nature" (physei makra,
> IIRC) and syllables which were "long by position" (thesei makra), the
> distinction being something along the lines of "has a long vowel" vs
> "ends in two or more consonants", or something like that, which does
> seem to indicate that syllable quantity played a part.
That is relevant *only* to the metrics of verse. It has no relevance at
all to the placement of the pitch accent.

> I don't remember the details, but I think it was something along the
> lines of whether the accent was acute or circumflex?
Nope. A circumflex could appear only on a long vowel; it could not
appear on just any heavy syllable. The acute accent could occur on long
or short vowels (the grave replaced an acute on the final vowel under
certain circumstances).

Syllable quantity had nothing whatever to do with the placement of pitch
accent.
=====================================================

H. S. Teoh wrote:
 > On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 07:34:43PM +0100, R A Brown wrote:
 > [...]
 >
 >>1. Ancient Greek did not, as far as we know, have word stress; there
 >>possibly was phrasal stress, but we can merely guess how that might
 >>have worked.
 >>2. It is clear that ancient Greek words had *pitch* accent. The pitch
 >>was:
 >> (a) *not* dependent upon syllable quantity, but *solely on vowel
 >> length*
 >> (a) high pitch could occur on any one of the vowels in the last
 >> *three* syllables, according to certain rules.
 >
 > Ah yes, the familiar accent rules of ancient Greek.

Correct   :)

 >I think the fact
 > that they differentiated between grave, acute, and circumflex (I forget
 > the native Greek terms for them) should indicate that something more
 > than just stress was happening.

It unlikely that stress was involved at all, at least in the Classical
period. We are told that acute represent high pitch and circumflex
represent high falling back to 'normal'. The grave replaces an acute on
the final vowel under certain circumstances; there is much debate as to
what exactly this indicates (obviously some sort of 'pitch sandhi').

It appears in fact to have been similar to the pitch system of Vedic
Sanskrit. But alas the Greeks were less clear in their descriptions than
the ancient Indian phoneticians were.

 >>3. The modern Greek stress accent occurs (with very few exceptions) on
 >>the same syllable as the ancient Attic & Koine pitch accent(1). This
 >>is a strong indication IMHO that there was no separate word stress to
 >>interfere with the process whereby pitch gave way to stress.
 >
 > Out of curiosity: how much do we understand of what drives this process?

That it happened during the Koine suggests to me that it was the
internationalization of Greek and its becoming spoken by peoples with
other linguistic habits that gave rise to the change. People unused to
pitch accent would, I suspect, give some stress or emphasis to the vowel
they were attempting to give a rise in pitch to. In time stress
prevailed and pitch difference simply became a redundant feature.

 >
 >>(1) In fact even for ancient Greek we know the pitch accent for only
 >>the Attic, Epic and Aeolic (conventionally, other dialects are usually
 >>printed according to the Attic system). The Koine Greek of the
 >>Hellenistic period used the same pitch accent as Attic Greek.
 >
 > [...]
 >
 > Now I'm curious: what are the sources we have on the pitch accent system
 > of ancient Greek? If I recall correctly, some ancient writings allude to
 > them---what are those sources, and how reliable are they?

I don't know of the top of my head, but they were originally introduced
by the Alexandrian grammarians of the 2nd cent BCE as aids to pronounce
Homer correctly (Epic dialect); when Koine Greek developed, it was found
useful to use them to indicate the correct pronunciation for non-Greek
speakers. As Koine Greek was basically an internationalized form of
Attic Greek, it is fair assumption that the accentuation of Attic was
practically the same as Koine.

As for Aeolic, we are told by IIRC more than one authority that they
treated all words according to the 'recessive accent' system of Greek verbs.

 > Also, how confident are we that Koine continues to use pitch accents?

I am sure the Greeks themselves were still using pitch accent and I
suspect the more discerning L2 speakers tried to do things properly -
but the change took place during this period.

 > I
 > had taken a course on Attic Greek some years ago, and recently I took
 > another course on Koine. I noticed that, unsurprisingly, there were
 > signs that the language was beginning to move in the direction of modern
 > Greek.

Yep.

 > I'm curious, though, about how much it has done so---esp. wrt.
 > the pitch accent and the fricativisation of the aspirated consonants.

Graffiti at Pompeii where some Greek words are written in Roman script
show quite clearly that fricativization had already occurred in
colloquial speech by the middle of the 1st cent CE. But the continuing
practice of the literati in distinguishing writing phi as |ph| rather
than the (Pompeian) |f| suggests that the 'upper classes' hadn't adopted
the colloquial fricativization. But fricativization must have become
more and more the norm in the 2nd & 3rd centuries CE.

As for stress accent - we do not have clear evidence that stress accent
was the norm until the 4th cent CE; but there are indications as early
as the 2nd cent CE that transition from pitch to stress had begun.

 > (The reason I'm asking is because my Attic Greek course used Erasmic
 > pronunciation whereas the Koine course used modern Greek---and it irks
 > me immensely that many words are homophonous under the modern Greek
 > pronunciation, esp. the 1pp and 2pp, and the itacized diphthongs, when
 > they are obviously pronounced distinctly back then.)

Yes - it irked Erasmus also   :)

But the Erasmian pronunciation, though considerably closer, to the
ancient, is only a makeshift. Whether one uses Erasmian or modern
pronunciation, it is normal to use the modern stress system. We could
adopt the Vedic pitch system and apply it to the Erasmian, I guess -
that would undoubtedly get closer to the ancient. Though I am sure the
result would cause amusement to any ancient Greek   :-)

--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB}

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