Re: Stress placement systems

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. 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.


> 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?


> (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?

Also, how confident are we that Koine continues to use pitch accents? 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. I'm curious, though, about how much it has done so---esp. wrt.
the pitch accent and the fricativisation of the aspirated consonants.

(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.)


T

--
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? -- Erich Schubert