Re: Stress placement systems

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 07:55:04PM +0100, R A Brown wrote:
[...]
> H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> > 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.
That's very interesting. Perhaps they are relics of a pitch accent
system in PIE?


> >>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.
Ah, that sounds plausible enough.


[...]
> > 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);
How much does Homer differ from Attic in this respect (accents)?


> 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.
OK.


> 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.
Cool. I wonder what caused the differentiation.


> > 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.
Ahhh, I see. So the foreigners substituted stress for pitch, and
eventually the natives also started adopting it. Hmm, this gives me
con-world ideas. :-)


> > 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.
Wow, this is interesting. I hadn't expected it to have happened this
early. I remember reading a hypothesis that perhaps it had begun even in
Classical times: is this plausible, or do we know for sure that it came
later?


> 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.
Right.

Now, something I've always wondered about is why [p^h] fricativizes to
[f] rather than [P]. Or perhaps [P] was an intermediate form that
eventually became [f]?


> 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.
I see. So basically it started around Hellenistic times, or going into
the Byzantine period.


> > (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.
That's true. How confident are we about the actual values of vowels in
Classical Greek, though? (I understand the reconstructed values are not
quite the same as the Erasmic?)

Now, during my Koine course, I was told that there is evidence even in
the New Testament itself that itacization was starting to happen (e.g.
with some words misspelling iota for eta). I'm curious about the extent
of this, and whether the loss of the optative has something to do with
the collapse of /oi/ to [i].

Also, I understand that the iota subscript wasn't actually used until
Byzantine times, correct? In uncial writing it was written as long vowel
+ iota --- my question is, was it actually pronounced in Koine, or had
it become irrelevant already? What about in Classical times?


> 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   :-)
[...]

Hehe, it sounds amusing enough even to my ears, at any rate. :-)

How well-described is the Vedic system? Recently, through learning
Russian, I'm beginning to appreciate just how much nuance there is in
actual speech, that is never recorded in the textbooks. If one went
merely by textbook descriptions and second-hand information, one would
pronounce Russian very strangely indeed! And were it not for actual,
living, native speakers, one could be easily deluded to think that one's
pronunciation is quite accurate. So now I'm wondering about just how
much information has been preserved about these ancient tongues, or how
wildly inaccurate our attempted reconstructions are. :-)


T

--
People say that I'm indecisive, but I'm not sure about that. -- YHL

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