well, we ['we' meaning 'the human race' -- specifically, a team of astrophysicists, astronomers, mathematicians, and classical scholars -- not a group including me specifically] have finally done it: we have figured out the basic functions of the so-called ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM, or AM as i'll call it here. the newswires are abuzz just now with information about the AM -- there are articles in the new york times and nature, among others -- so i'll offer just a few of my own observations here.
[1] this is a prime example of how hi-tech modern science can shed light on ancient cultures -- AND if we [and *here* by 'we' i mean 'the classicists'] can make a convincing case, deep-pockets organizations like the national science foundation [NSF] will put out [what feels to us like] big bucks to fund the research. my esteemed colleague and longtime friend nick rauh has already taken this theory to the bank several times, winning a jaw-dropping THREE 6-figure grants from the NSF for his 'rough cilicia archaeological survey' project.
[2] how interesting that the AM was found, not in rome or athens, not even on kythera, but off the coast of *anti*kythera -- a tiny little island, population approximately 44. who knows what other treasures remain as yet undiscovered in such out-of-the-way locales. keep your eyes peeled.
[3] interesting too that it took 'us' over a century to decipher. when we did, it turned out that this gizmo was designed -- suprise, surprise -- to measure the movement of the sun and moon, and to calculate eclipses. once again we see the absolute primacy of these heavenly bodies in ancient thought. we ourselves tend both to take them for granted, much of the time, and to be completely captivated by them, at others. this function of a complicated mechanical device over 2000 years old, by the way, tends to confirm my surmise that the theory of gerald s. hawkins, about STONEHENGE, is also correct. it just stands to reason.
[special thanks to my pal CHAD BUSK ESQ for sending me this link to an excellent article on the AM. it's the best i've seen.]
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Saturday, September 09, 2006
ASK CORAX: pronouncing ancient greek
Magister,
In reading and discussing the Iliad, I'm picking up an actual aversion to using character names because I don't know how to say them correctly, and neither (it seems) does anyone else. For example,
Patroclus - Pátroklos - which I would instinctively pronounce something like PA-truh-kluss, I have heard in forms such as PE-truh-kluss, puh-TRAW-kluss, and even with a textually invisible extra schwa, puh-TRAW-kuh-luss.
I realize that none of these is probably analogous to the original Ancient Greek (if we can even say for sure how that language sounded), but I'd really like to be able to mumble something passable when I'm talking about Diomedes, Idomeneus, Andromache, etc. Any suggestions? Many thanks in advance,
Ian
SALVE DISCIPVLE OPTIME : S : V : B : E
ah my good ian, what a can of worms you've opened up here. nonetheless, i am glad you did so -- i want you to pursue your classical education up hill and down dale, and into every nook and cranny of knowledge that you can find. just so you know, though: this is the hard-core stuff you're peering into now.
the reason i call this 'a can of worms' is that you have touched on a couple of issues that cannot be disambiguated without getting pretty technical, nor without also addressing several other issues equally esoteric and difficult. that said, i'll try and keep this as streamlined -- and as lucid -- as i can. you know me well enough to know not to hesitate to ask for clarification if i have not been clear on this or that topic.
first, time out for some nomenclature.
[1] ACCENT in greek does not mean what it means in latin. rather it means something more like what is meant in modern chinese: classical greek accent was TONAL. thus [despite whatever you may hear, even out of the mouths of classics professors] those diacritical marks on a page of greek are NOT there to mark stressed syllables: they are to mark what was originally a quasi-musical tone [intervals of perhaps a musical third to a fifth].
[2] STRESS: when we say 'accent' in speaking of modern western-european languages, and even of classical latin, we are talking about the stress that falls on one or more syllable in a word. physiologically i assume this has to do with greater breath coming through the larynx and out the lips. as you can see, though, this is an accident waiting to happen, because of the confusion between classical and modern notions of 'accent.' so it's good to keep the notion of 'stress' separate from 'accent' in ancient greek.
when speaking of the stressed syllables in greek [or even latin] verse, some scholars, at least, still call this the 'ictus.' it's useful to have another word than 'accent' to talk about this, so i support the use of 'ictus' in this context. it is roughly synonymous in such a sense with 'rhythm,' but that's a mine-field of its own, in classical metrics, so best for the moment just to set the word 'rhythm' aside.
[3] QUANTITY: modern verse is ictus-based: that is to say, modern metrics depends on recognizing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. tennyson's
to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
[from his poem 'ulysses,' in fact] is a perfect iambic pentameter -- in the modern sense: five unstressed syllables alternating with five stressed. [note, just FWIW, that they are all ten of them monosyllables, and that 'not' is one of the stressed. masterful.] classical greek meter, on the other hand, was NOT ictus- or stress-based, but rather what we call quantative -- i.e. based on the QUANTITY [long or short] of each syllable. thus the first line of the iliad
andra moi ennepe, mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla
is scanned as a perfect dactylic hexameter -- in the ancient sense: six dactyls, i.e. six feet, each composed of one dactyl: one long syllable followed by two short ones. NOTE, however, that 'long' does not necessarily mean 'accented' [in either the modern or the ancient sense of that word]: i.e. it is possible for a LONG syllable to have a tonal marking or not. *** since both VOWELS and SYLLABLES can be termed 'long,' some scholars use the terms LIGHT and HEAVY to distinguish the short or long syllable when speaking of ancient greek [quantitative] verse.
[4] MELODY. as if this were not complicated enough already, add to all the above that homer's iliad and odyssey were originally SUNG to the lyre. that is, in addition to knowing where the stressed and unstressed syllables [if any] came, and where the tones rose and fell in ordinary conversation, there was also a melody mapped on to the text. i have always surmised that the melody [probably fairly primitive -- and n.b., the lyre in the 8th century BCE only had four strings] roughly followed the ups and downs of the spoken tones of greek. but there's no absolute proof of that; we don't have any reliable evidence of what homeric music was like; but i was gratified some years ago when martin west, one of the greatest living homeric scholars, published an essay in the JOURNAL OF HELLENIC STUDIES positing this theory himself. [for some inexplicable reason he does not, however, acknowledge me as the fons et origo of the idea ...]
so you see, to answer your question we are conjuring with a number of different elements here. you ask, innocently enough, how to pronounce 'patroklos'; i assume that at one level you are asking how the name was spoken in conversation. but i do want you to realize that that is [or might be] different from how it is spoken [or sung!] in homeric verse. also, that the way homer pronounced it [in conversation] might have differed from how a byzantine [or later] scholar pronounced it.
the accent marks, incidentally, were not yet written on greek words in plato's day, and certainly not in homer's [if anyone was even writing greek in homer's day -- yet another can of worms]. plato is of course aware of the differences in tonal accent, and in fact refers to the phenomenon in his CRATYLVS [399], but he is talking about the sound, not any written indication of accent. it appears that accent marks began to be added in about 200 BCE -- probably at alexandria, and very likely by the scholar aristophanes of byzantium.
by the time of socrates and plato, the living tradition of improvised oral [pre-literate] epic, i.e. what homer produced as a creative artist, was long gone; what you had instead was a professional class of re-creative artists known as RHAPSODES, who RECITED [rather than SANG] the portions of the epics that they had MEMORIZED. so already the performative tradition had morphed drastically by the fifth century BCE, the glory days of athens.
i have made a couple of recordings of classical greek verse. these are online in streaming audio at
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/fll/kirby/index.htm
if you play the one of stesichorus's 'palinode,' you will hear my attempt at rendering classical greek tonally. the other excerpt, which is a bit longer, is a passage from homer [iliad 3.395-412], and in this one i despaired of trying to keep a regular hexameter rhythm going while also pronouncing the tonal accents correctly. but if homer had been induced to speak rather than to sing his verses, that is precisely what i expect he would have done. did the rhapsodes also recite tonally? i bet they still did, for the simple reason that [on the evidence of plato's cratylus] they were still speaking conversationally with tonal accents.
here are some other recordings of homer read aloud with attention to the tonal accents:
http://turdpolish.com/greek.html [despite the inelegant URL he has some smart things to say here, as well as some well-produced sound-recordings]
http://www.prosoidia.com/od1-10.html
several hundred years after plato -- certainly by the late fourth century CE, and likely a couple hundred years before that -- the shift had probably reached the point where the tonal accent was being lost in greek. what was happening at that point was that the syllables marked with [originally tonal] accent-marks were beginning to be pronounced as if they received the stress. and, moreover, new verse being composed in that era was stress-based, rather than quantitative.
i still have not answered your question, i see. here is what w. sidney allen, in his authoritative book VOX GRAECA, has to say about stress in classical greek [i assume he was not talking about its effect on the student studying it]:
the classical greek accent was, as we have seen, tonal. it is, however, improbable that greek words and sentences had no variations of stress. this has often been recognized, but there has been a tendency to assume that any such element of stress must have been connected with the high tone, since pitch is frequently an important factor in the complex phenomenon of stress-accentuation. but, for one thing, it is not necessarily high pitch that is involved in such cases -- in different languages it may be high, low, or changing pitch; and for another, stress is not conversely a necessary feature of tonal accentuation; so that it is possible for a language having a tonal accent to have also a stress-patterning that is quite unconnected with this accent.
moreover, any connection of stress with high tone seems to be ruled out by the fact that in classical greek there is no correlation of the accent with the metrical stress or 'ictus' .... we therefore assume that greek verse was recited with a stressed rhythm .... it should ... be possible, from a statistical study of various types of greek metre, to discover whether there are any strong tendencies for particular syllables in words of various quantitative patterns to coincide with the presumed ictus of the verse; if so, it may be reasonably deduced that such syllables were normally stressed in speech. from such a study the following rules seem to emerge [for words of more than one syllable]: [a] words were primarily stressed on their last heavy syllable; [b] a secondary stress fell on preceding heavy syllables if separated from the primary stress by at least one mora of quantity ... this hypothesis produces 90-95% agreement between verse-ictus and natural [prose] speech-rhythm in both the tragic trimeter and the epic hexameter .... [[pp 120-121]]
and how, you may well ask, does one distinguish a heavy syllable from a light? here's allen again:
if a syllable contains a long vowel, it is always 'heavy' .... but if it contains a short vowel, its quantity depends upon the nature of the syllable-ending. if it ends with a vowel ['open' syllable], the syllable is 'light' ... but if it ends with a consonant ['closed' syllable], the syllable is heavy. [[p 97]]
that book was first published in 1968 [third edition 1987; my citations are from the second edition of 1974]. allen went on to advance a more fully-enunciated version of his stress-accent theory of spoken ancient greek in a book called ACCENT AND RHYTHM [1973, so my 2nd edition of VOX GRAECA would reflect that]. the whole thing boiled up a firestorm of controversy: based on what we can find in ancient grammarians who sort-of-discuss this stuff, the received wisdom was that there was no stress accent in classical greek, whether spoken or recited [i.e. prose/conversation nor verse]. but allen was one of the 'big guns' of historical linguistics at that time, so his theories could not be dismissed lightly. on the whole, i would say that most linguists have felt the need to reject allen's thesis -- very respectfully, to be sure, but reject it nonetheless. a good example would be the article by a. m. devine and l. d. stephens in the transactions of the american philological society 115 (1985) 125-152, 'stress in greek?' in this long and technical essay, they weigh allen's thesis on its merits, but decide when all is said and done that classical greek was probably a non-stress-accented language like japanese. here is the clearest passage in that essay [this from pp 146-147]:
if we believe that in ancient greek the accented vowel was not only higher pitched but also significantly louder and/or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the greek accent was a pitch differentiated stress like that of serbo-croat or lithuanian. in that case, the innovation of the modern greek accent is limited to the elimination of the rising/falling distinction between acute and circumflex and the sharpening of the durational distinction between accented and unaccented vowels (note in particular the elimination of long vowels in unaccented syllables). if, on the other hand, we believe that in ancient greek accented vowels were not significantly louder or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the ancient greek accent was a pure pitch accent comparable mutatis mutandis to that of japanese. this latter view has the better chance of being correct.
i suppose one of the most important, perhaps THE most important, lesson to be taken away from this is that not even the experts can agree. allen is a god in that subfield of classics, and devine & stephens are among the very most respected classical linguists working today; but they are diametrically at odds here -- and yet the most emphatic demurrer devine & stephens can offer is 'this latter view has the BETTER CHANCE of being correct.' nobody truly knows.
now the best argument that can be rallied [apart from allen's own] against what devine & stephens assert here is that greek is, like latin [and serbian and croatian and lithuanian] an indo-european language, whereas japanese is not. it would be very helpful if one could cite uncontroversially an indo-european language in which there is no stress accent. FRENCH is sometimes adduced as an example -- i.e. one is often taught that each syllable in a french sentence should receive an identical amount of stress -- but all you have to do is turn on any french TV or radio to see that this is science fiction. [in practice, it's better to teach one's french student that the default syllable for a stress-accent is the ultima. but that's for someone else's blog to hash out, i guess.]
a second argument might be the very difficulty of imagining a pre-literate poet improvising, on the spot, hundreds of lines of hexameter verse [in a meter, by the way, that was not native to greek -- it seems to have been imported into the greek-speaking world from the indus valley] in which he is expected sometimes to balance syllables that are long but unstressed, on one hand, against syllables that are short but stressed, on the other. [this is precisely what vergil does, incidentally, in the AENEID -- but remember that vergil is [a] composing in LATIN, where there has been a long prior tradition of stress-based verse; [b] composing in WRITING, which gives him the opportunity to linger as long as he wants [we calculate from his comments about the GEORGICS that he composed these at the rate of one hexameter line per day], and [c] experimenting [as it's been shown by scholars] with a particular technique in which the first half or so of the hexameter line deals with conscious tension between long syllables and stressed syllables, whereas the second half of the line has much greater coincidence of long and stressed. in other words, the vergilian hexameter is quite a different animal from the oral improvised verse of homer and hesiod.
we've come a very long way, i fear, for you just to be told 'there's no clear answer to your query.' if you are fuming by now, you have every right to be. let me say, though, that this also gives YOU a certain license: it means that you can pronounce 'patroklos' in whatever way pleases you best.
one way that has appealed to many who come [like you] from latin to greek, is to use the rules of latin accent: if the vowel of the penult is long, the penult is stressed; otherwise the antepenult. [remember now that we are talking just about VOWELS, not about SYLLABLES, in which a short vowel + 2 consonants = a long syllable.] as long as you remind yourself every day that that is NOT a rule in greek, you could do worse than that. moreover, it accords somewhat with what allen so gingerly advances in the theory cited above.
if you were to approach it this way, you would have the following the [tonal] accent is on the first syllable, but the stress is on the penult'. saying 'putt-ROK-loss,' with a trilled R, ought to get you somewhere in the right ball park. if you want to get fancy, pronounce the first syllable higher than the other two -- that should be the most 'accurate' for the greek of homer's day.
as for the other names you mention -- diomedes, idomeneus, andromache -- the situation is further complicated by [a] the way the ROMANS pronounced greek words, which may well have been something like what we've discussed above, and [b] the way MODERNS [in english, german, french, etc] pronounced greek [and, for that matter, latin] before the twentieth century. if you read the wonderful novella GOODBYE, MR CHIPS, or c. s. lewis's autobiography SURPRISED BY JOY, you will see references to the 'new' pronunciation of greek and latin.
why are you hearing such disparity of pronunciation amongst your colleagues? well, the pronouncing of the language overall is a difficult problem, but the whole NAME issue is particularly hopelessly mucked up. we refer to vergil's poet friend as HORACE, for example, but that's because the french call him that; we borrowed their name for him. his actual full name, in latin, was 'publius horatius flaccus' -- except in the vocative case, which was 'publi horati flacce.' his mother probably called the young horace to dinner with 'publiiiii!' -- but in adulthood, friends and acquaintances probably referred to him as horatius [the family name] or flaccus or horatius flaccus. so what should we do? insist on 'horatius'? nobody will know whom we are talking about, at least not till we explain. [and, to be consistent, it would mean calling catullus 'valerius' from now on ... etc etc etc]
so too with APOLLO: this is what the romans called this [greco-roman] god. but in greek he was called APOLLON, with the final O being an omega. so what should we do? insist on the 'correct' greek name? we will sound hopelessly pedantic. [even more than most classical scholars do.]
this is the problem we are facing with 'diomedes.' in greek, those vowels come out, more or less, 'dee-oh-MEH-dess.' that will work fine in germany. but -- if you are speaking english, to someone in the USA or UK, it will seem quite esoteric. most americans say 'dye-oh-MEE-deez.'
'idomeneus' entails a particular problem: that final diphthong, which is odd to american ears. if you can imagine the duchess of devonshire wrinkling her nose in disdain, and exclaiming 'oh!' -- that is more or less the sound of the diphthong EU in classical greek. [my first greek professor told us to say it the way choate boys say 'choate.' as an old choate boy myself, i took umbrage, but i said nothing. the next day i did come to class wearing my choate tee shirt, though.] 'idomeneus' is an unusual enough name that you can probably get away pronouncing it 'accurately' in that way -- but if you are going to strive for absolute consistency, you will have to pronounce 'zeus' that way too -- and nobody i know says anything, in english, other than 'zooss' for that.
andromache: again, the ancients would have trilled that R at least lightly. you will sound precious if you do that in english. i suggest 'ann-DROM-ma-khee,' bearing in mind that in greek, the final E was an eta, and thus more or less a longish open 'ehh.'
this should at least get you started. i should close by stressing once again that these are deep and troubled waters: not entirely uncharted, but full of sea-serpents. i've probably given you a lot more philology here than you bargained for; but you deserve nothing less. that's what i say.
some more relevant and useful URLs, if you haven't yet quenched your linguistic thirst:
greek phonology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology
phonation in different cultures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek_in_teaching
mora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29
erasmian pronunciation
http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/10/erasmian-pronunciation.html
an impassioned plea, by william harris, for reading greek tonally
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/Greekaccents.html
In reading and discussing the Iliad, I'm picking up an actual aversion to using character names because I don't know how to say them correctly, and neither (it seems) does anyone else. For example,
Patroclus - Pátroklos - which I would instinctively pronounce something like PA-truh-kluss, I have heard in forms such as PE-truh-kluss, puh-TRAW-kluss, and even with a textually invisible extra schwa, puh-TRAW-kuh-luss.
I realize that none of these is probably analogous to the original Ancient Greek (if we can even say for sure how that language sounded), but I'd really like to be able to mumble something passable when I'm talking about Diomedes, Idomeneus, Andromache, etc. Any suggestions? Many thanks in advance,
Ian
SALVE DISCIPVLE OPTIME : S : V : B : E
ah my good ian, what a can of worms you've opened up here. nonetheless, i am glad you did so -- i want you to pursue your classical education up hill and down dale, and into every nook and cranny of knowledge that you can find. just so you know, though: this is the hard-core stuff you're peering into now.
the reason i call this 'a can of worms' is that you have touched on a couple of issues that cannot be disambiguated without getting pretty technical, nor without also addressing several other issues equally esoteric and difficult. that said, i'll try and keep this as streamlined -- and as lucid -- as i can. you know me well enough to know not to hesitate to ask for clarification if i have not been clear on this or that topic.
first, time out for some nomenclature.
[1] ACCENT in greek does not mean what it means in latin. rather it means something more like what is meant in modern chinese: classical greek accent was TONAL. thus [despite whatever you may hear, even out of the mouths of classics professors] those diacritical marks on a page of greek are NOT there to mark stressed syllables: they are to mark what was originally a quasi-musical tone [intervals of perhaps a musical third to a fifth].
[2] STRESS: when we say 'accent' in speaking of modern western-european languages, and even of classical latin, we are talking about the stress that falls on one or more syllable in a word. physiologically i assume this has to do with greater breath coming through the larynx and out the lips. as you can see, though, this is an accident waiting to happen, because of the confusion between classical and modern notions of 'accent.' so it's good to keep the notion of 'stress' separate from 'accent' in ancient greek.
when speaking of the stressed syllables in greek [or even latin] verse, some scholars, at least, still call this the 'ictus.' it's useful to have another word than 'accent' to talk about this, so i support the use of 'ictus' in this context. it is roughly synonymous in such a sense with 'rhythm,' but that's a mine-field of its own, in classical metrics, so best for the moment just to set the word 'rhythm' aside.
[3] QUANTITY: modern verse is ictus-based: that is to say, modern metrics depends on recognizing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. tennyson's
[from his poem 'ulysses,' in fact] is a perfect iambic pentameter -- in the modern sense: five unstressed syllables alternating with five stressed. [note, just FWIW, that they are all ten of them monosyllables, and that 'not' is one of the stressed. masterful.] classical greek meter, on the other hand, was NOT ictus- or stress-based, but rather what we call quantative -- i.e. based on the QUANTITY [long or short] of each syllable. thus the first line of the iliad
is scanned as a perfect dactylic hexameter -- in the ancient sense: six dactyls, i.e. six feet, each composed of one dactyl: one long syllable followed by two short ones. NOTE, however, that 'long' does not necessarily mean 'accented' [in either the modern or the ancient sense of that word]: i.e. it is possible for a LONG syllable to have a tonal marking or not. *** since both VOWELS and SYLLABLES can be termed 'long,' some scholars use the terms LIGHT and HEAVY to distinguish the short or long syllable when speaking of ancient greek [quantitative] verse.
[4] MELODY. as if this were not complicated enough already, add to all the above that homer's iliad and odyssey were originally SUNG to the lyre. that is, in addition to knowing where the stressed and unstressed syllables [if any] came, and where the tones rose and fell in ordinary conversation, there was also a melody mapped on to the text. i have always surmised that the melody [probably fairly primitive -- and n.b., the lyre in the 8th century BCE only had four strings] roughly followed the ups and downs of the spoken tones of greek. but there's no absolute proof of that; we don't have any reliable evidence of what homeric music was like; but i was gratified some years ago when martin west, one of the greatest living homeric scholars, published an essay in the JOURNAL OF HELLENIC STUDIES positing this theory himself. [for some inexplicable reason he does not, however, acknowledge me as the fons et origo of the idea ...]
so you see, to answer your question we are conjuring with a number of different elements here. you ask, innocently enough, how to pronounce 'patroklos'; i assume that at one level you are asking how the name was spoken in conversation. but i do want you to realize that that is [or might be] different from how it is spoken [or sung!] in homeric verse. also, that the way homer pronounced it [in conversation] might have differed from how a byzantine [or later] scholar pronounced it.
the accent marks, incidentally, were not yet written on greek words in plato's day, and certainly not in homer's [if anyone was even writing greek in homer's day -- yet another can of worms]. plato is of course aware of the differences in tonal accent, and in fact refers to the phenomenon in his CRATYLVS [399], but he is talking about the sound, not any written indication of accent. it appears that accent marks began to be added in about 200 BCE -- probably at alexandria, and very likely by the scholar aristophanes of byzantium.
by the time of socrates and plato, the living tradition of improvised oral [pre-literate] epic, i.e. what homer produced as a creative artist, was long gone; what you had instead was a professional class of re-creative artists known as RHAPSODES, who RECITED [rather than SANG] the portions of the epics that they had MEMORIZED. so already the performative tradition had morphed drastically by the fifth century BCE, the glory days of athens.
i have made a couple of recordings of classical greek verse. these are online in streaming audio at
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/fll/kirby/index.htm
if you play the one of stesichorus's 'palinode,' you will hear my attempt at rendering classical greek tonally. the other excerpt, which is a bit longer, is a passage from homer [iliad 3.395-412], and in this one i despaired of trying to keep a regular hexameter rhythm going while also pronouncing the tonal accents correctly. but if homer had been induced to speak rather than to sing his verses, that is precisely what i expect he would have done. did the rhapsodes also recite tonally? i bet they still did, for the simple reason that [on the evidence of plato's cratylus] they were still speaking conversationally with tonal accents.
here are some other recordings of homer read aloud with attention to the tonal accents:
http://turdpolish.com/greek.html [despite the inelegant URL he has some smart things to say here, as well as some well-produced sound-recordings]
http://www.prosoidia.com/od1-10.html
several hundred years after plato -- certainly by the late fourth century CE, and likely a couple hundred years before that -- the shift had probably reached the point where the tonal accent was being lost in greek. what was happening at that point was that the syllables marked with [originally tonal] accent-marks were beginning to be pronounced as if they received the stress. and, moreover, new verse being composed in that era was stress-based, rather than quantitative.
i still have not answered your question, i see. here is what w. sidney allen, in his authoritative book VOX GRAECA, has to say about stress in classical greek [i assume he was not talking about its effect on the student studying it]:
the classical greek accent was, as we have seen, tonal. it is, however, improbable that greek words and sentences had no variations of stress. this has often been recognized, but there has been a tendency to assume that any such element of stress must have been connected with the high tone, since pitch is frequently an important factor in the complex phenomenon of stress-accentuation. but, for one thing, it is not necessarily high pitch that is involved in such cases -- in different languages it may be high, low, or changing pitch; and for another, stress is not conversely a necessary feature of tonal accentuation; so that it is possible for a language having a tonal accent to have also a stress-patterning that is quite unconnected with this accent.
moreover, any connection of stress with high tone seems to be ruled out by the fact that in classical greek there is no correlation of the accent with the metrical stress or 'ictus' .... we therefore assume that greek verse was recited with a stressed rhythm .... it should ... be possible, from a statistical study of various types of greek metre, to discover whether there are any strong tendencies for particular syllables in words of various quantitative patterns to coincide with the presumed ictus of the verse; if so, it may be reasonably deduced that such syllables were normally stressed in speech. from such a study the following rules seem to emerge [for words of more than one syllable]: [a] words were primarily stressed on their last heavy syllable; [b] a secondary stress fell on preceding heavy syllables if separated from the primary stress by at least one mora of quantity ... this hypothesis produces 90-95% agreement between verse-ictus and natural [prose] speech-rhythm in both the tragic trimeter and the epic hexameter .... [[pp 120-121]]
and how, you may well ask, does one distinguish a heavy syllable from a light? here's allen again:
if a syllable contains a long vowel, it is always 'heavy' .... but if it contains a short vowel, its quantity depends upon the nature of the syllable-ending. if it ends with a vowel ['open' syllable], the syllable is 'light' ... but if it ends with a consonant ['closed' syllable], the syllable is heavy. [[p 97]]
that book was first published in 1968 [third edition 1987; my citations are from the second edition of 1974]. allen went on to advance a more fully-enunciated version of his stress-accent theory of spoken ancient greek in a book called ACCENT AND RHYTHM [1973, so my 2nd edition of VOX GRAECA would reflect that]. the whole thing boiled up a firestorm of controversy: based on what we can find in ancient grammarians who sort-of-discuss this stuff, the received wisdom was that there was no stress accent in classical greek, whether spoken or recited [i.e. prose/conversation nor verse]. but allen was one of the 'big guns' of historical linguistics at that time, so his theories could not be dismissed lightly. on the whole, i would say that most linguists have felt the need to reject allen's thesis -- very respectfully, to be sure, but reject it nonetheless. a good example would be the article by a. m. devine and l. d. stephens in the transactions of the american philological society 115 (1985) 125-152, 'stress in greek?' in this long and technical essay, they weigh allen's thesis on its merits, but decide when all is said and done that classical greek was probably a non-stress-accented language like japanese. here is the clearest passage in that essay [this from pp 146-147]:
if we believe that in ancient greek the accented vowel was not only higher pitched but also significantly louder and/or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the greek accent was a pitch differentiated stress like that of serbo-croat or lithuanian. in that case, the innovation of the modern greek accent is limited to the elimination of the rising/falling distinction between acute and circumflex and the sharpening of the durational distinction between accented and unaccented vowels (note in particular the elimination of long vowels in unaccented syllables). if, on the other hand, we believe that in ancient greek accented vowels were not significantly louder or longer ceteris paribus than unaccented vowels, then the ancient greek accent was a pure pitch accent comparable mutatis mutandis to that of japanese. this latter view has the better chance of being correct.
i suppose one of the most important, perhaps THE most important, lesson to be taken away from this is that not even the experts can agree. allen is a god in that subfield of classics, and devine & stephens are among the very most respected classical linguists working today; but they are diametrically at odds here -- and yet the most emphatic demurrer devine & stephens can offer is 'this latter view has the BETTER CHANCE of being correct.' nobody truly knows.
now the best argument that can be rallied [apart from allen's own] against what devine & stephens assert here is that greek is, like latin [and serbian and croatian and lithuanian] an indo-european language, whereas japanese is not. it would be very helpful if one could cite uncontroversially an indo-european language in which there is no stress accent. FRENCH is sometimes adduced as an example -- i.e. one is often taught that each syllable in a french sentence should receive an identical amount of stress -- but all you have to do is turn on any french TV or radio to see that this is science fiction. [in practice, it's better to teach one's french student that the default syllable for a stress-accent is the ultima. but that's for someone else's blog to hash out, i guess.]
a second argument might be the very difficulty of imagining a pre-literate poet improvising, on the spot, hundreds of lines of hexameter verse [in a meter, by the way, that was not native to greek -- it seems to have been imported into the greek-speaking world from the indus valley] in which he is expected sometimes to balance syllables that are long but unstressed, on one hand, against syllables that are short but stressed, on the other. [this is precisely what vergil does, incidentally, in the AENEID -- but remember that vergil is [a] composing in LATIN, where there has been a long prior tradition of stress-based verse; [b] composing in WRITING, which gives him the opportunity to linger as long as he wants [we calculate from his comments about the GEORGICS that he composed these at the rate of one hexameter line per day], and [c] experimenting [as it's been shown by scholars] with a particular technique in which the first half or so of the hexameter line deals with conscious tension between long syllables and stressed syllables, whereas the second half of the line has much greater coincidence of long and stressed. in other words, the vergilian hexameter is quite a different animal from the oral improvised verse of homer and hesiod.
we've come a very long way, i fear, for you just to be told 'there's no clear answer to your query.' if you are fuming by now, you have every right to be. let me say, though, that this also gives YOU a certain license: it means that you can pronounce 'patroklos' in whatever way pleases you best.
one way that has appealed to many who come [like you] from latin to greek, is to use the rules of latin accent: if the vowel of the penult is long, the penult is stressed; otherwise the antepenult. [remember now that we are talking just about VOWELS, not about SYLLABLES, in which a short vowel + 2 consonants = a long syllable.] as long as you remind yourself every day that that is NOT a rule in greek, you could do worse than that. moreover, it accords somewhat with what allen so gingerly advances in the theory cited above.
if you were to approach it this way, you would have the following the [tonal] accent is on the first syllable, but the stress is on the penult'. saying 'putt-ROK-loss,' with a trilled R, ought to get you somewhere in the right ball park. if you want to get fancy, pronounce the first syllable higher than the other two -- that should be the most 'accurate' for the greek of homer's day.
as for the other names you mention -- diomedes, idomeneus, andromache -- the situation is further complicated by [a] the way the ROMANS pronounced greek words, which may well have been something like what we've discussed above, and [b] the way MODERNS [in english, german, french, etc] pronounced greek [and, for that matter, latin] before the twentieth century. if you read the wonderful novella GOODBYE, MR CHIPS, or c. s. lewis's autobiography SURPRISED BY JOY, you will see references to the 'new' pronunciation of greek and latin.
why are you hearing such disparity of pronunciation amongst your colleagues? well, the pronouncing of the language overall is a difficult problem, but the whole NAME issue is particularly hopelessly mucked up. we refer to vergil's poet friend as HORACE, for example, but that's because the french call him that; we borrowed their name for him. his actual full name, in latin, was 'publius horatius flaccus' -- except in the vocative case, which was 'publi horati flacce.' his mother probably called the young horace to dinner with 'publiiiii!' -- but in adulthood, friends and acquaintances probably referred to him as horatius [the family name] or flaccus or horatius flaccus. so what should we do? insist on 'horatius'? nobody will know whom we are talking about, at least not till we explain. [and, to be consistent, it would mean calling catullus 'valerius' from now on ... etc etc etc]
so too with APOLLO: this is what the romans called this [greco-roman] god. but in greek he was called APOLLON, with the final O being an omega. so what should we do? insist on the 'correct' greek name? we will sound hopelessly pedantic. [even more than most classical scholars do.]
this is the problem we are facing with 'diomedes.' in greek, those vowels come out, more or less, 'dee-oh-MEH-dess.' that will work fine in germany. but -- if you are speaking english, to someone in the USA or UK, it will seem quite esoteric. most americans say 'dye-oh-MEE-deez.'
'idomeneus' entails a particular problem: that final diphthong, which is odd to american ears. if you can imagine the duchess of devonshire wrinkling her nose in disdain, and exclaiming 'oh!' -- that is more or less the sound of the diphthong EU in classical greek. [my first greek professor told us to say it the way choate boys say 'choate.' as an old choate boy myself, i took umbrage, but i said nothing. the next day i did come to class wearing my choate tee shirt, though.] 'idomeneus' is an unusual enough name that you can probably get away pronouncing it 'accurately' in that way -- but if you are going to strive for absolute consistency, you will have to pronounce 'zeus' that way too -- and nobody i know says anything, in english, other than 'zooss' for that.
andromache: again, the ancients would have trilled that R at least lightly. you will sound precious if you do that in english. i suggest 'ann-DROM-ma-khee,' bearing in mind that in greek, the final E was an eta, and thus more or less a longish open 'ehh.'
this should at least get you started. i should close by stressing once again that these are deep and troubled waters: not entirely uncharted, but full of sea-serpents. i've probably given you a lot more philology here than you bargained for; but you deserve nothing less. that's what i say.
some more relevant and useful URLs, if you haven't yet quenched your linguistic thirst:
greek phonology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology
phonation in different cultures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek_in_teaching
mora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_%28linguistics%29
erasmian pronunciation
http://abecedaria.blogspot.com/2005/10/erasmian-pronunciation.html
an impassioned plea, by william harris, for reading greek tonally
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Classics/Greekaccents.html
Thursday, September 07, 2006
ASK CORAX: the eleusinian mysteries and hallucinogens
Dear Corax,
Is there any reason to believe psychedelics were involved in the Eleusinian Mysteries?
LOL! that depends [partly] on one's theology.
i laughed just now, but i actually meant what i said there. an ancient who really believed in the existence and divine power of demeter and persephone would answer you, 'well, there's no need for 'extra help' from psychedelics: the goddess can accomplish whatever she wants, no matter how overwhelming or supernatural, on her own.'
a rationalist/naturalist, looking for non-numinous explanations of what was happening at eleusis [and clearly something important and memorable was happening there -- for hundreds and hundreds of years] would of course posit that there had to be some natural explanation of the phenomena. absent the modern ability to create really trompe-l'oeil virtual-reality special effects, the likeliest non-supernatural explanation is some sort of hallucinogen.
the best exposition [that i'm aware of] that could be adduced in support of a rationalist/naturalist explanation is carl ruck et al., THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS. [if you're interested in eleusis you should also read karl kerenyi, ELEUSIS: ARCHETYPAL IMAGE OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, and then perhaps also ESSAYS ON A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY: THE MYTH OF THE DIVINE CHILD AND THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS, a collaboration between kerenyi and his pal carl jung.]
we know that the initiates at the eleusinian mysteries were given a kukeion or 'mixture' of something to ingest as part of the initiation ritual; that's as close to a 'smoking gun' as we are liable to get here. what makes this plausible is that [a] demeter is a grain goddess above all, and [b] ergot grows on grains -- so if the kukeion was made from ergotic grains, as seems very likely for such a ritual, it would be a convenient way to deliver the stuff to the initiate. the greatest single obstacle in our way is the amazing reluctance of anyone, even initiates who later converted to christianity [thus putatively repudiating any allegiance to the old pagan gods], to discuss the details of what went on in that initiation ceremony.
incidentally, you may not know that a similar biochemical explanation has been given for the 'mania' of the maenads: the theory was published in ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, no less, in the nov/dec 1995 issue. it was by adrienne mayor, and was called called 'Mad Honey! Bees and the Baneful Rhododendron.' briefly, mayor's theory posits that the mead drunk by the maenads [or 'bacchae,' to use a less deprecatory term] was made from rhododendron honey that contained grayanotoxin. this stuff sounds much less body-friendly than, say, psilocybin. but i suppose it's possible that such a honey was indeed used in making their mead. what you don't see in the descriptions of the bacchae [say, in their eponymous play by euripides] is any mention of the somatotoxic effects associated with grayanotoxin. to hear them tell it, they've seen god. [if you haven't read that amazing play, btw, you should. i recommend especially the hair-raising translation by paul woodruff and published by hackett.]
plenty of stuff online about this, at e.g.
http://tinyurl.com/qomnu
http://www.sonomapicnic.com/06/ravhoney.htm
http://www.paghat.com/toxichoney.html
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ag151/addendum.html
and apparently mayor has included something about this in her 2005 book:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/12/224943.php
here's an old [1996] post to sci.agriculture.beekeeping and citing a
presumably older USDA report on grayanotoxin:
http://tinyurl.com/ezjy9 [also at
http://www.hbd.org/brewery/library/HonD.html ]
i don't know how one would go about preserving the euphoric effects of such a substance while also minimizing its dysphoric. it sounds pretty potent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
anyway. thus far, two theories seeking to explain the eleusinian mysteries: a theological one and a biochemical one [the latter designed to debunk the former]. of course, there is also a third possibility: that both explanations are true. to accept this third way, one has to allow for the scope of the divine in biochemistry; or [conversely] for a theology that is not inimical to the discoveries of science.
someday you should go to greece and see eleusis itself. even in the searing sunlight of a greek summer, it is hauntingly evocative. it's only about 13 miles from athens, but it feels like another world away -- much quieter than the tourist sites in athens proper. last summer i took a group of students there as part of my course, 'greek mythology in greece.' we read the ancient texts [in english translation of course] and then went to see the actual places where they were set.
until you can get over to greece, here are some graphics to whet your appetite. start by having a look at an archaeological architect's model of the reconstructed precinct, just to jump-start your imagination.
as soon as you arrive at the site, you come to the greater and lesser propylaia, through which for a thousand years it was death to enter if you weren't [or weren't about to become] initiated. the gates were so heavy, they made grooves in the stone.
even before you get to the telesterion there are 'sites' associated with the story of the abduction of persephone -- for instance, the cave of hades. hard by the cave is a hole which, they say, leads directly to the underworld. this is just a guess on my part -- maybe someone has published research to corroborate this by now -- but i'm guessing there were dramatic reenactments of the whole story in this area -- outside the telesterion but within the precinct.
the telesterion itself was huge -- particularly for an ancient venue of this sort. you can see what's left of it by clicking here. [just think, those were the very seats [carved out of the living rock] on which the initiates sat as they were inducted into the mysteries!]
as i mentioned, it's all so quiet now. whenever i go there, it's completely deserted. but one would love to know what were the 'things seen' that the ancient participants described in such veiled language ...
Is there any reason to believe psychedelics were involved in the Eleusinian Mysteries?
LOL! that depends [partly] on one's theology.
i laughed just now, but i actually meant what i said there. an ancient who really believed in the existence and divine power of demeter and persephone would answer you, 'well, there's no need for 'extra help' from psychedelics: the goddess can accomplish whatever she wants, no matter how overwhelming or supernatural, on her own.'
a rationalist/naturalist, looking for non-numinous explanations of what was happening at eleusis [and clearly something important and memorable was happening there -- for hundreds and hundreds of years] would of course posit that there had to be some natural explanation of the phenomena. absent the modern ability to create really trompe-l'oeil virtual-reality special effects, the likeliest non-supernatural explanation is some sort of hallucinogen.
the best exposition [that i'm aware of] that could be adduced in support of a rationalist/naturalist explanation is carl ruck et al., THE ROAD TO ELEUSIS. [if you're interested in eleusis you should also read karl kerenyi, ELEUSIS: ARCHETYPAL IMAGE OF MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, and then perhaps also ESSAYS ON A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY: THE MYTH OF THE DIVINE CHILD AND THE MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS, a collaboration between kerenyi and his pal carl jung.]
we know that the initiates at the eleusinian mysteries were given a kukeion or 'mixture' of something to ingest as part of the initiation ritual; that's as close to a 'smoking gun' as we are liable to get here. what makes this plausible is that [a] demeter is a grain goddess above all, and [b] ergot grows on grains -- so if the kukeion was made from ergotic grains, as seems very likely for such a ritual, it would be a convenient way to deliver the stuff to the initiate. the greatest single obstacle in our way is the amazing reluctance of anyone, even initiates who later converted to christianity [thus putatively repudiating any allegiance to the old pagan gods], to discuss the details of what went on in that initiation ceremony.
incidentally, you may not know that a similar biochemical explanation has been given for the 'mania' of the maenads: the theory was published in ARCHAEOLOGY magazine, no less, in the nov/dec 1995 issue. it was by adrienne mayor, and was called called 'Mad Honey! Bees and the Baneful Rhododendron.' briefly, mayor's theory posits that the mead drunk by the maenads [or 'bacchae,' to use a less deprecatory term] was made from rhododendron honey that contained grayanotoxin. this stuff sounds much less body-friendly than, say, psilocybin. but i suppose it's possible that such a honey was indeed used in making their mead. what you don't see in the descriptions of the bacchae [say, in their eponymous play by euripides] is any mention of the somatotoxic effects associated with grayanotoxin. to hear them tell it, they've seen god. [if you haven't read that amazing play, btw, you should. i recommend especially the hair-raising translation by paul woodruff and published by hackett.]
plenty of stuff online about this, at e.g.
http://tinyurl.com/qomnu
http://www.sonomapicnic.com/06/ravhoney.htm
http://www.paghat.com/toxichoney.html
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~ag151/addendum.html
and apparently mayor has included something about this in her 2005 book:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/09/12/224943.php
here's an old [1996] post to sci.agriculture.beekeeping and citing a
presumably older USDA report on grayanotoxin:
http://tinyurl.com/ezjy9 [also at
http://www.hbd.org/brewery/library/HonD.html ]
i don't know how one would go about preserving the euphoric effects of such a substance while also minimizing its dysphoric. it sounds pretty potent.
anyway. thus far, two theories seeking to explain the eleusinian mysteries: a theological one and a biochemical one [the latter designed to debunk the former]. of course, there is also a third possibility: that both explanations are true. to accept this third way, one has to allow for the scope of the divine in biochemistry; or [conversely] for a theology that is not inimical to the discoveries of science.
someday you should go to greece and see eleusis itself. even in the searing sunlight of a greek summer, it is hauntingly evocative. it's only about 13 miles from athens, but it feels like another world away -- much quieter than the tourist sites in athens proper. last summer i took a group of students there as part of my course, 'greek mythology in greece.' we read the ancient texts [in english translation of course] and then went to see the actual places where they were set.
until you can get over to greece, here are some graphics to whet your appetite. start by having a look at an archaeological architect's model of the reconstructed precinct, just to jump-start your imagination.
as soon as you arrive at the site, you come to the greater and lesser propylaia, through which for a thousand years it was death to enter if you weren't [or weren't about to become] initiated. the gates were so heavy, they made grooves in the stone.
even before you get to the telesterion there are 'sites' associated with the story of the abduction of persephone -- for instance, the cave of hades. hard by the cave is a hole which, they say, leads directly to the underworld. this is just a guess on my part -- maybe someone has published research to corroborate this by now -- but i'm guessing there were dramatic reenactments of the whole story in this area -- outside the telesterion but within the precinct.
the telesterion itself was huge -- particularly for an ancient venue of this sort. you can see what's left of it by clicking here. [just think, those were the very seats [carved out of the living rock] on which the initiates sat as they were inducted into the mysteries!]
as i mentioned, it's all so quiet now. whenever i go there, it's completely deserted. but one would love to know what were the 'things seen' that the ancient participants described in such veiled language ...
Saturday, July 15, 2006
a new blog column [blogumn?]: ASK CORAX
hi all, and happy summer to you. today i received via email a query that got me thinking: why not answer it at CORAXIOMS? that way we can entertain something like an 'ASK CORAX' column here, where people write in with questions about classics.
so watch this space for the inaugural ASK CORAX column [or 'blogumn' -- if that word catches on, remember, you saw it here first!] ... and consider sending corax your own query [email: corax@purdue.edu]
so watch this space for the inaugural ASK CORAX column [or 'blogumn' -- if that word catches on, remember, you saw it here first!] ... and consider sending corax your own query [email: corax@purdue.edu]
Thursday, June 08, 2006
in defense of vampires?
in her presentation on bathory erszébet yesterday, daphne tossed out a rather provocative idea: the possibility that, unlike bathory, who might well be classified as a serial killer, the classic vampires of fiction and film [like dracula] deserve our sympathy if not our outright approval: they, like any other predators of the animal kingdom, must feed on their prey to survive. like a lion or a tiger, they are simply doing what it is their 'nature' to do, and, as such, ought not to inspire revulsion -- much less be hunted or destroyed.
so: any responses to this?
so: any responses to this?
Saturday, June 03, 2006
neil jordan's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE [1994]
here, as promised, is a blog post where you can [via the comment function] add your reflections on jordan's INTERVIEW. as we have said in class, i'm particularly interested in your responses to the following:
1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?
2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the anne rice novel?
[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]
1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?
2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the anne rice novel?
[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]
francis ford coppola's BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA [1992]
here, as promised, is a blog post where you can [via the comment function] add your reflections on coppola's DRACULA. as we have said in class, i'm particularly interested in your responses to the following:
1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?
2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the stoker novel?
[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]
1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?
2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the stoker novel?
[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]
Thursday, February 09, 2006
the da vinci code: have at it
here you go: your one-stop, all-purpose blog entry on dan brown's best-selling novel THE DA VINCI CODE.
for those of you who have not yet read it -- indeed, for those who have, as well -- here's the WIKIPEDIA entry on the novel. [note that the article contains plot spoilers, so if you intend to read the book or see the movie, and want to be surprised, now is not yet the time to read the entirety of this wikipedia entry.']
speaking of the internet, i think it's noteworthy that this print-format book has not only a feature film based on it, but also a very significant 'web presence.' there is, for example, an 'official website' for the fictional protagonist robert langdon, and other websites such as thedavincicode.com and seekthecodes.com which [potentially] dramatically increase the interactive nature of the reader's/viewer's experience of the book [and presumably of the film].
rather than say anything more about this phenomenon -- arguably as big a 'splash' in the publishing world as the advent of the novel DRACULA itself -- i'll just open the floor for you. add your comments below! jk
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