I'm a philosophy professor, 69 years old, and teach Attic Greek. This is the best video about Attic Greek pronunciation I encountered on UA-cam. Absolutely superb and the most accurate approach to Attic pronunciation.
I am only starting to learn Ancient Greek, restored Attic. I am quite specific about Attic and keen with best language pronunciation as possible. To you, Ancient Greek professionals, I'd like to submit an idea. A major hurdle in proper language pronunciation acquisition is insufficient access to native speech. This has always been an issue with dead languages (though I like to think that Greek isn't really dead, nor even Latin, to the extent that various linguistic continuities can be found). So here goes my proposal... Why not take advantage of AI and LLMs, all developments, since some years ago already, to have a software learn and produce a natural sounding Attic Greek, etc. (any language of interest). Such a software could be refined several times, until reaching a version where most experts will agree they are absolutely or near absolutely happy with. Such a product could then be used by restored Attic Greek learners all over the world, listening to endless hours of ancient literature, thereby being able to acquire, if so they wish, a natural sounding Attic Greek. We could partially ressucitate the language and experience the joy of speaking it with near-native ease and pronunciation. At least for those who care this much about pronunciation. Another application would be making use of recorded native voices, from the purest speakers of each language today at risk of extinction or accelerated degradation (of which there are thousands), so we can teach AI how to speak it, for the benefit of concerned populations. Such a tool could be used to stop and even reverse language degradation and loss in a multitude of places around the world, Europe included. As a native Catalan speaker, I feel despair at how my language is fast becoming a radically impoverished and transvestite language, where not only words and expressions are lost by the thousands, every decade, but even the phonetics and syntax etc. are quickly being corrupted. Soon, the Spanish political framework and demographics, combined, will make this evolution unstoppable and irreversible. The only way we could prevent such catastrophic change would be some political miracle and/or a technological one, with AI.
Did you ever get ideas about real languages with real pitch accent in action pronounced by native speakers ? 1) Finnish 2) Japanese 3) Classical Arabic I include also Sanskrit because some speakers can show this caracteristic very clearly into the traditional recitation.
@@cattubuttas4749 , whatever the phonetics of a language, if it is alive, native speaker recordings can be used to train AI systems. Whether it is tonal, has pitch accent, clicks, or whatever. Sanskrit is alive, but I have no idea how today's real life phonetics are regarded in terms of a standard language. Around 15,000 people in India claim to speak it as their native first language, but how are their pronunciation and other language features regarded? They might be regarded as dialectal or modern, relative to some classical standard. Many more people learn Sanskrit as a second language. But again, how is their pronunciation (or prosody in general) regarded? No idea. Language experts should have a debate, in each case (for each language), about what standard(s) of language it is desirable for an AI system to learn/develop. Both classical and modern standards seem desirable for some languages. Even dialectical standards. Why not go for everything while we can? Everything is valuable. I have just started learning Sanskrit, by the way, together with Ancient Greek. I am still learning the alphabet. 😅
@@nomcognom2414 for the "live" languages there is no problem in finding recordings but for Sanskrit I use ASSIMIL recordings which are great for getting an idea. They have free samples of chapter 1, chapter 50 and chapter 100 of the book. Assimil courses recordings for Latin and Ancient Greek are less valuable in particular the Latin ones are very bad, Greek ones barely acceptable.
I don't know about any of you, but modern Greek still retains the pitch accent to my ears. Example from the video being, (from 9:00-10:00) Μακάριοι οι πτωχοί τώ πνεύματι Mak'ari `i-i ptoh'i-i t`o-o pne'vmati Stress accent on the "a" -ri flows into long "i-i" (pronounced "ee"); the "i" from ptohi flows into "to" from high to low and holds on the "o"; then the "eu/ev" is slightly longer from transitioning from the epsilon to the V-sound the ypsilon makes in this position. Makάrὶ ῖ ptohί-tῶ pnέvmatὶ Yeah, I've heard whole sections swallowed up in rapid-fire dialogue, but for those that don't run their mouths on high octane you can hear a flow in the language. Like that of going up and down a mountain trail. Maybe it's a regional difference like hearing someone that comes from Kalamata speak versus someone from Thesaly or Pontus. Still, even with that flow, they can talk fast, like Speedy Gonzales fast, and good luck even those well versed in the language, native or taught, to understand everything they say. "makari i ptohi to pnevmati" (I swear that's a rich man's guide book to world domination, for if one is to be "blessed" for his "poor spirit," then does that mean his cunning wiles earns him more fortune above the charitable and downtrodden? Jesus said it does when his story promoted the servants that invested his money vs the one that saved it for safe keeping; he got punished for that. Funny lessons in that thing.) (look up Charles Giuliani truthhertzradio and christendumb)
Modern Greek normally do not distinct length of the vowels, but as a native speaker if I observe it while I read, most likely pitch rules fall into place.
Yes, I think Modern Greek has retained a kind of vestigial pitch accent even if it isn't necessarily done consciously. Certainly it has a very flowing, sing-song quality to it.
Fantastic !!! Fantastic !!! Some two decades ago I worked out a part of this, as follows, though I failed to publish it. So I am glad to see your achievement. Evidently, you have used a wider range of evidence than I did, and you are far more expert than I was. I guess that you have an Australian accent, like mine? My story is that the scheme must be so simple that a one year old child will naturally master it. The top and bottom pitches are about a musician's fourth interval apart. At about 12:00, I would say that the grave is the same as no acute, aka unaccented, as your written note says. It means that the top pitch is maintained, until an acute accent mark comes along; I wouldn't call it transitional. My fundamental rule is that an acute accent mark is the immediate precursor of an abrupt drop in pitch to the bottom. Consequently, a circumflex is an acute on the first mora, indicating an abrupt drop to bottom pitch on the second mora. A sentence starts at the mid pitch and immediately proceeds to the top pitch. Then the top pitch is maintained, right through an acutely accented syllable, till immediately after the acute accent mark. Immediately after the bottom pitch, one goes to the mid pitch and then the top pitch, which is maintained till immediately after the next acute accent mark. I think this more or less agrees with your scheme. Ready to discuss.
10:34 I think you're right; circumflex is best described as high -> low, not rising-falling. My understanding is the "rise" is built up through previous morae, and with the circumflex there is a fall.
Hi again. I was re-re-re watching your video as a refresher for vowel length in pronunciation. I listened several times to your Seikilos epitaph. Have you thought about making a recording of the ancient music that we have? I’d pay good money to hear you perform the Homeric poems. You’d be a rockstar!
Thank you, that is a pretty neat idea! I know there are some performers who do a good job of recreating plausible musical settings for Homer's epic poetry. It's really hard to get into the right headspace for doing that though - Ancient Greek music is fundamentally different from Western harmony, and it's like speaking in a different musical language.
Really excellent video! Definitely the best take on this topic in an accessible format on the internet. A couple points: -You touch on this, but I wouldn't assume that the accented mora must be higher than the preceding mora. Given the musical evidence and given how similarly the pitch accent system works to ancient Greek in languages like Japanese, it's likely that the most salient feature of the accent is the following downstep. Morae preceeding the downstep could probably reach the same height as the accented mora - this really helps explain the grave accent, where what IMO it's really marking is the lack of a following downstep. Thus "θεος ην" is moraically /tʰe.ós é.è.n/, where ós is the same pitch as é, so can't be considered an accute. The tʰe could be lower or approaching the same pitch (this should depend on how emphasized the word is and the prosody of the sentence), and similarly the final mora n would typically say low, but could potentially rise if you want to add, e.g. question intonation. -I notice that you tend to pronounce words like πάντα as if the ν were part of the first mora, with the downstep on the τα. Although very minor, this is maybe the only thing I'd call a mistake. ν is a sonorant and its own mora, so the downstep should be heard most clearly in the transition from ά to ν. This once again has a very clear parallel in Japanese - /n/ is a mora which can't carry the accent itself, but you will very clearly hear the downstep if there's an accented mora before /n/. -I briefly mentioned this above, but the single most helpful concept one can take from Japanese to sound natural in Greek IMO is the way things like question intonation interact with accent. The rule is that you can do whatever you want after the accent as long as you don't interfere with the downstep between accent and the following mora. So for instance, θεός has no downstep within the word, so you can pronounce the entire word with a rising question intonation "θεός?" But if you do this with "πάντα" you violate the accent, so what you'd do instead is do the downstep between πά and ν, and then quickly rise on the τα.
As someone with some knowledge of classical Greek and a smattering of Japanese, the difference between the two systems of pitch accent is intriguing. I think I understand it. In Greek, only one mora of a word can receive high pitch, with an obligatory down step on the next mora. In Japanese, that is not the case; indeed, a very common pattern is low-high-high, as in watashi (I/we), which is pronounced wàtáshí. This causes difficulty for English-speaking learners of Japanese, as the tendency is to want to drop the voice after the first high-pitched mora, giving an incorrect pitch contour to the word. Also, Japanese high pitch is normally only one step higher, not a fifth. Attempts to impose an interval of a fifth on Greek produce the effect of someone more than slightly tipsy. If one analyzes Greek pitch accent according to moras, there is no need to talk about pitch contours: a given mora can be either high or not-high; only if a syllable contains a two-mora vocalic core, can there be a pitch rise or fall within a syllable.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of the claim that the pitch was a one-fifth jump! That is pretty high. Though still plausible, at least in theory - if I sound out the Mandarin tones to myself, I can hear that in isolation at least, the high first tone and the low third tone are maybe even a bit more than a fifth apart in pitch. In rapid speech the tones do all kinds of interesting things to each other and probably don't sound as far apart as when someone is demonstrating pitch for pedagogical purposes. If "a musical fifth" was what the grammarians wrote down, then maybe when the Ancient Greek teachers were speaking slowly and emphatically to students it was a fifth interval, but it could have been a bit flatter in rapid speech.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010 I believe Dionysius of Halicarnassas wrote that the pitch accent was confined to an interval of about a fifth. But its assumed he meant that it was never more than that, not that it was always such a jump.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010not to discount the possibility of it being as large as a 5th but in my intuition as someone with basic mandarin and fluent Japanese; tonal languages like mandarin with 4 or more tones have a larger range of frequencies going on than pitch accent languages (based on an admitted sample size of 1 of each lol). In any case i suspect the highest tone and lowest tones of mandarin have around twice the distance between them (maybe more) than the high and low of Japanese. I’m interested in hearing from people from other pitch accent languages.
So actually Japanese is, like Greek, only able to have one accented mora per word. This mora can be higher than surrounding mora, or it can simply be marked with a downstep. The preceding mora aren't really high at a phonological level, but they tend to approach or equal the accented mora in pitch, since it's the downstep that marks the accent, not absolute pitch. It's quite likely that Greek worked the same way given the musical evidence. That is, the accented mora doesn't necessarily need to be higher than the preceding mora, as long as its followed by a downstep. The only phenomenon definitely present in Japanese and probably not present in Greek is that there tends to be a noticeable rise in pitch between the first two morae of the word if the accent is later in the word, which results in transcriptions like the one you gave, 'wàtáshí'. But this is really more noticeable in emphasized words - otherwise, it's really just the downstep that's mandatory. Greek very well may have been exactly the same. As for the idea that the difference in pitch should be of a particular musical interval, this can probably be discounted.
@@mikem9001 I'm not sure we really know what the ancient Greek intervals were. When in Greece I saw the music notation of the Ode to Apollo written on a series of stones and no one as yet has been able to decipher it. In any case, our span of a 5th is based on the Well-Tempered Clavier of JS Bach and still exists today in modern music. But Greek intervals could be smaller than our 12 steps of the chromatic scale. Some music from the Middle East uses quarter-tones, and if the Greeks used a system such as that, their chromatic scale might have as many as 27 steps, making a leap of a 5th resembling a span of 2 1/2 steps in our system. It's all highly speculative but it's a possible explanation that would avoid the extraordinarily large, cumbersome leap of our 5th.
Very interesting video. In my Greek linguistics class in uni, my professor told us the pitch accent makes a different of a fifth in pitch and that has always seemed very high to me, but I assumed it was based on sources from Greek grammarians. It seems more doable and natural that how high or low a pitch goes is not always the same.
Thank you! I'm glad this helps provide a practical way to recreate pitch accent! It is still plausible to speak Ancient Greek with a fifth interval rise, but I suspect that in rapid speech it would get flatter. At least, the song melodies in Ancient Greek seem pretty happy to frequently use intervals smaller than a fifth when rising to an acute accent.
I remember trying to do this with Attic Greek 101 on my own when I was taking a class, being disappointed that we didn't try to pronounce it tonally. It was easier to learn orthography and morphology when trying to do a tonal accent rather than a stress. Play and beauty are important to me. I was also inspired listening to Mandarin in the airport to and from break at college. The difficulty was with making sure the higher pitch was not always a consequence of louder pronunciation, so I was trying to keep each syllable at the same volume - does that make sense?
This is a super introduction to the subject, thank you. I love the charming way you pronounce these snippets, with this ever-so-slightly Australian dialect of Greek. I started learning Ancient Greek about a year ago, with an ancient Teach Yourself book (Kinchin Smith and Melluish). Since starting I've subsequently started to learn rudiments about the actual pronunciation in Ancient Greece. In fact this TY book explicitly says in the introduction that they're not going to bother with accents "because they're unimportant" ... ! Sadly this also reflects what Allen says in his otherwise very useful book *Vox Graeca*, most of which I've now read: "don't think about trying to get the accents, it's too hard and not worth having such aspirations"!!! I find these attitudes absolutely bizarre! I now have a target accent: 5th Century BCE Attica! The "other" challenge there (apart from accents) is the aspirated/unaspirated allophones, τ/θ, κ/χ and π/φ. It's hard but not impossible by any means: I find the best way is to try and speak the unaspirated ones in a sort of Spanish accent, because Spanish has this tendency to swallow accents (i.e. to prefer unaspirated), whereas with English there generally seems to be a mixture of aspirated and unaspirated. Have you done anything on the unaspirated/aspirated allophones? I had a glimpse at your UA-cam vids but couldn't see anything.
As a German speaker the aspirated allophones are pretty natural to me. It's the unaspirated ones that I have trouble with, contrary to what is often said.
@@firstaidsack I'm an English-speaker and I'd say the same. That's why I mentioned Spanish. My Spanish is rudimentary but I am generally quite good at the mimickry of accents. The first time I ever heard Spanish my reaction was "wow, that's quite hard to follow, as they are swallowing the consonants". As in most contemporary languages native to Europe and spoken in Europe, there is no allophone issue: a Spanish person could aspirate all their consonants and it wouldn't cause misunderstandings. But I would put money on Ancient Greek's unaspirated consontants having sounded quite Spanish.
I haven't watched the whole video yet, but the melody sounds plausible. Off topic: I think your accent sounds mostly Australian, but I notice that you occasionally pronounce your Rs in the end of at least some words (are, or, there) in the absence of a following vowel, where I wouldn't expect an Australian to do so, whereas an American would. And your Os are occasionally a bit more American-like, too (closer to an Australian 'aw', e.g. in 'low'). I was wondering if you are an Australian immigrant to the United States, or if there is some tendency among young Australians in general to switch to a more American-like accent?
You're probably hearing the Linking R and the Intrusive R of the Australian accent: the rule is that R is pronounced between vowels to keep them separated. So there is no R sound in "are good", but there is in "are awful". This rule applies even to words with no R at the end like "data" or "law", in which case it's called "Intrusive". The same phenomenon exists in UK English and in old US accents like JFK's. I would expect that the more American-style O is due to the influence of having lived in Singapore, since the Singaporean accent has that feature too.
You mention the "AD 50" pronunciation and link to a playlist, which are private videos. I would be interested in checking it out. You definitely speak the language nicely.
This is a brilliant, innovative, and easily applicable analysis… very well done! The point about how all of these rules orbit around creating a very particular pitch-rhythm in was so insightful I was genuinely shocked. it’s made understanding why and what is going on easy and almost intuitive. Also, in your pragmatically reading a grave as an acute section, it’s almost as though the pitch is being spread out over two vowels in different words, in order to add extra emphasis. I can imagine ēn actually retaining the falling accent to further emphasize the word “God” by contrasting its rising pitch
Thanks for this presentation. I found it clear, logical and informative. It's very exciting to discover pitch: it makes Attic Greek so much more exciting to try and speak than it was when I was trying to learn the stress accent! Thanks also for the links at the end of your presentation.
Thanks a lot for the superb explanation. It is so inspiring ! So as you have said it takes 2 morae (instead of just 1) in a syllable in order to make pitch accents possible.
Did you ever get ideas about real languages with real pitch accent in action pronounced by native speakers ? 1) Finnish 2) Japanese 3) Classical Arabic I include also Sanskrit because some speakers can show this caracteristic very clearly into the traditional recitation.
I’m glad you made this video. It’s great to see more accessible educational resources available on this topic. Hopefully it’ll encourage more students to embrace the pitch accent rather than be scared off without even attempting to understand it first. As you say, embracing the pitch offers a more realistic and euphonic sound and helps disambiguate words that would otherwise be homophones. Also, I have a question about ἄνθρωπός. Why is there an accent on the antepenult and the ultima? I’ve only seen the word with the accent on the antepenult, but I’ve also only studied Attic. Is that a Koine thing or something else?
Thank you! With άνθρωπός εστιν, the word following άνθρωπος is 'εστιν' which is an 'enclitic' or basically a word which usually lacks an accent. Enclitics do weird things to the accents around them because they kind of combine with the previous word to make a super long word, and that sometimes means the preceding word gets a second accent on it.
What she said! I would dare to add, that I find it helps to think of the last part of the word as separated off and joined with the following enclitic. So it becomes "anthrop osestin". You are probably already used to reading "de" as almost joined with the word it follows, so this is really just the reverse process. I don't claim to have any great knowledge about this, but I've just found it makes the two raised pitch accents fit well together.
I have been looking for a comfirmation like this since I was 13. So I was no fool when I tried to pronounce ancient Greek with pitch accent at school. My teacher said it was undoable. As a Dutchman, I could pronounce the ypsilon and almost all the dyphtongs already. Our equivalent of /eu/, written as /ui/, is rare. Later studying Czech helped me to pronounce early /ou/. I learnt the aspirates from initial English and German voiceless stops and the accents from Chinese. Maybe the circumflex was rising and falling after all. If so, its writing follows its pitch contour. English speakers make the sound when intonating, for example, the interjection 'wow' that way, and Dutch speakers make the sound when saying 'ja' to express joy. However, the Mandarin Chinese equivalent is easier for me to pronounce.
The word αάατος as others really breaks the rules that are based on weird accents of letters and the idea of diphthongs being pronounced as proposed. One has to make a mess out of many things in the language to accommodate ideas such as Ita or Ipsilon being a long E and OU sounds, especially when the names of the letters say it in their name, its EE that has some characteristic they call TA, whereas the other one is called EE psilon, high pitch EE, but they’re talking us it’s OU because Germans and English pronounce the letter that way.
12:22 - omg, the names are the same as 4 French accents ... Yoy.. this reminds me of a self talk after seeing a video ith (short) two in a car comparing ith french w swedish (?) Or ith the comparisson just started in my mind... but it was sth on the pitches... (& ith french has sth like it tho more subtly, or it used to have in older times??)
I keep writing the answer to somebody and double check if it has been posted. I get acknowledged that the answer has been posted and I can read it but it is still getting deleted all the times. There are no offesnsive words in my answer what's the problem with it ? I just mention a good languages publisher and that s it....WHAT'S WRONG with it ???
Unfortunately yt has a censor bot that auto deletes our comments based on somewhat arbitrary word choices that aren't even remotely offensive most of the times
This is the first time ever I have seen the tonal system of ancient Greek. It has many similarities to Serbian. Makes me wonder if there were some linguistic substrata transferred.
7:26 - ith this one is kinda like in French when you have the linking of words în sound like in ... Oh no example comes to me... but if you know (any) French, you know what I mean...
Pitch accent s also part of Swedish The reason I couldn't carry on with it (well one of the reasons) ith its not that wide in there, but pretty overwhelming for a girl who speaks shyly... while trying my luck at swedish I realised you need real confidence to start speaking 4 real a lang like that... (similarly with chinese much earlier, tho felt more overwhelming...)
However if you really wanted to emphasize the composite quality of circumflex accents you might also need to emphasize the origin of those consecutive vowels. For example the 2nd declension genitive singular would need to be explained (as in Mycenaean and Homer) as -óyo, hence a circumflex when the two vowels contracted. The same for the infinitive ending -ein, which is apparently for uncontracted -ehen. The same goes for contract verbs in Attic.
How does a word like γένηται fit into the high/low/neutral pattern where you describe there being only up to one neutral mora? Isn’t αι long and therefore doesn’t this word contain two neutral morae within the αι ending?
Regarding reading graves as accutes: In mandarin stress on a grave accent (corresponding to ̌ ) happens all the time. 好的 (hǎo de), which means "alright", is often heavily stressed on the first syllable for example. Most swedish dialects have it as well in their pitch accent, so you'd pronounce "iris" as "ī̀ris".
@geoffgjof There are different dialects according to population/rite. But each of them have a way of connecting the sound of semantically joined words and of separating ideas... and then of also relating ideas to and from one another, and of highlighting.
The way we use stress accent, we always drop pitch on the accented syllable. Using this on καρδιά and ημέρα sends the pitch in the wrong direction. I am using Erasmian pronunciation with pitch tones (with a Greek accent!) and it’s not at all difficult. And as I’ve noted before, the difference between a well done Erasmian pronunciation and a well done Lucian pronunciation is as small as the difference between a Canadian accent and an American one. PS: Have I mentioned how much I appreciate your videos? (Both Greek and Latin!) And I loved the music and the way you used it to illustrate the pitch accent!
Thank you for your kind words! I do agree, a well-executed Erasmian is not very different at all in practice to a well-executed Lucian or Attic pronunciation. It's nice to hear you're using pitch accent with your Erasmian.
In Greece we never read ancient greek like this. We use the modern greek pronunciation to read ancient greek, in schools and universities, which I begin to doubt as an accurate way of reading AG...
Several still spoken European languages still have a pitch accent: Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovenian, Swedish, etc. Why not base ancient Greek pitch accent upon a comparison with these living Indo-Germanic languages, rather than on the totally unrelated Chinese?
27 днів тому+1
Being Swedish I make a distiction between ánden the wild duck and ànden the spirit. Undortunately I am deaf to the Latvian and Lithuanian accents!
It’s not. Chinese is being used an example, but it’s not what the Greek is based off (especially when you remember that Chinese doesn’t actually include its tones in song as did Greek).
Very nice! But you pronounce diphthongs with Upsilon (Υυ) the modern way, which is not consistent to the rest of your pronunciation. They were not pronounced with “V” but with “U”. αυ = au, not av ευ = eu, not ev ηυ = ēu (roughly), not ēv ᾱυ = āu, not āv ου was as early as in the 5th century AC already monophthongized from ou to ū (roughly) (like ει did from ei to ī, roughly again) We pronounce this second vowel as V in modern Greek also, but this is by no means a diphthong (it contains only one vowel), nor a monophthong (it contains two sounds). It could be better described as a digraph. Thus the accentuation in ευ was in classical times different from what you pronounce, in that: pitch contour concerns also the u sound contained in the diphthong; you present ευ as consisting of a long vowel and a fricative consonant, but (such) consonants cannot have a pitch contour (and that is why you are by instinct performing the pitch on the vowel forcing it to be long). So: εῦ = éù εύ = eú ηῦ = eéù ηύ = eeú In koine (Hellenistic) ev and av did occur, but by then prosody was almost completely lost in oral speech acts, thus pronouncing like in previous periods is pretty inaccurate.
Learn the only real pronouciation which is The Greek of native speakers all others are artificial and hypothetical. Greek language is a living language and still the same language and not other like Latin and Italian which is different languages.
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Trying to pronounce classical Greek in a modern Greek way is artificial and hypothetical. Be guided by science, rather than by unthinking prejudice.
Given that pitch accents may well have been dead by then anyway, especially one imagines in non-native communities like the Jews of the Levant (not talking about Josephus, we’re talking about like “John”), it makes no sense to me to read New Testament Greek in this way tbh…
You should learn what a diaeresis is οι is pronounced eeh not ohee. It is only pronounced ohee if there is an diaeresis over the ιοτα. Otherwise ohee is written ωι. Modern Greeks pronounce the words like ancient Greeks there has never been a change unless you can specifically point when the change happened.
Not gonna lie, I find the tones in Mandarin difficult enough, let alone the pitches in Classical Greek. I love the idea of trying to reconstruct the pitches, but probably because of my modern cultural background, I find the pitches a little un-natural feeling. I am not saying it is unnatural, I am saying it 'feels' unnatural to me. For people who have learnt to speak this way, did it feel unnatural at the start? How long did it take to get used to it? On the topic of Buth's system, I do suspect some lengthened vowels are needed to work practically with his system, for example, in real life, consider a need to distinguish between the -ομεν and -ωμεν subjunctive endings. I don't think Buth ever discusses this specific practical issue in any of his works, but it seems to be a natural conclusion to me that a practical first century reconstruction would have retained some elements of vowel/syllable lengthening during the transitional period.
@@velvetcroc9827 1⁰ με τον όρο "ιστορική προφορά" αναφερόμαστε σ' αυτή που μιλάμε και σήμερα, ενώ με τους όρους (artificial, reconstructive, hypothetical) αναφερόμαστε στις τεχνίτες (ψεύτικες) προφορές που προσπαθούν να αποδώσουν υποθετικά την προφορά της αρχαίας, πράγμα αδύνατο διότι δεν υπήρχε μαγνητόφωνο εκείνη την εποχή. 2⁰ για την νορβηγική δεν γνωρίζω αλλά τουλάχιστον για ιαπωνικά έχω να πω ότι δεν έχουν καμία προσωδία. 3⁰ δυστυχώς όταν προσπαθούμε να μιμηθούμε άκριτα κάτι που δεν ξέρουμε, μοιάζουμε περισσότερο με μίμους. και αν κάποιος αρχαίος Έλληνας μας άκουγε μάλλον θα γέλαγε. Αλλά εκτός των άλλων είναι και ασέβεια προς την ελληνική γλώσσα και τους Έλληνες να μιλάει κάποιος τα ελληνικά έτσι ακατάληπτα, ειναι το ίδιο με το να διαβάζει κάποιος το Σέξπιρ και αντί π.χ. για made (μέιντ) να διαβάζει (μαδε)
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Πάτα Japanese pitch accent για να καταλαβαίνεις τι εννοούμε με τον όρο μελωδική προφορά. Εσύ για ποιό λόγο νομίζεις ότι εφευρέθηκε το πολυτονικό σύστημα; Έτσι για ομορφιά; Και δεν χρειαζόμαστε κανένα μαγνητόφωνο. Υπάρχουν πάμπολλες αποδείξεις από την γραμματεία (έχουμε μέχρι και αρχαίους γραμματικούς που μας εξηγούν οι ίδιοι κάποια πράγματα), τις επιγραφές καθώς και την ίδια την επιστήμη της γλωσσολογίας.
@@velvetcroc9827 (παρακαλώ διάβασε το όλο πριν απαντήσεις, αλλα και το προηγούμενο γιατί συμπλήρωνα κατι ενω απάντησες) Δεν είπα οτι τα αρχαία ελληνικά δεν είχαν προσωδία αλλα τα ιαπωνικά (άλλο το pitch accent δλδ τονισμός άλλο προσωδία)(εν πάση περιπτώσει δεν είναι το θέμα προς συζήτηση). Ουτε είπα οτι η προφορά έχει μείνει ατόφια τρείς χιλιάδες χρόνια. Είπα πως όλες αυτές η προφορές εκκλίνουν της πραγματικότητας. Τώρα όσον αφορά τις γλωσσολογικές αποδείξεις οι περισσότερες καταρρίπτουν της ερασμιακές προφορές (συν ο ίδιος ο Έρασμος) παραδείγματα: (Γαία αλλα γεωγραφία, γεωλογία κτλ) (εικόν>icon λατ. Ουρανός>Uranus λατ. Βο-ος συναίρεση βους αλλα δωρικός βως) (ω,ουF>j>∅) οι δίφθογγοι φαίνεται να προκύπτουν μόνο απο την ένωση με το F. όσο για τους αρχαίους συγγραφείς ο Θουκυδίδης αναφέρει ότι τον λιμό τον μπέρδεψαν με τον λοιμό αρα δεν υπάρχει αμφιβολία ότι τουλάχιστον το οι είχε μονοφθογγιστεί . Για να ειμαι ακριβοδίκαιος ναι φαίνεται πως υπάρχει κάποια βάση ως προς τα υ και η αλλα δεν είμαστε σίγουροι για την ακριβή φωνητική τούς αξία το (η) ηταν μάλλον ενδιάμεσο ε και ι ή το υ μάλλον ενδιάμεσο κλειστό ο και ι ή ο και ου. Και πρέπει να θυμόμαστε ότι οι αρχαίοι δεν είχαν εναν τρόπο προφοράς, αλλα οτι αυτή μπορούσε να διαφέρει απο λέξη σε λέξη, πόλη σε πολη και άτομο σε άτομο. Λοιπόν όπως είναι εμφανές η γλωσσολογία δεν μπορεί να μας διασαφήνισει την ακριβή φωνητική αξία αλλά μόνο τις διαφοροποιήσεις που υπάρχουν μεταξύ τούς. Οπότε η φράση (δεν είχαν κασετόφωνο) δεν ειναι ειρωνική (btw irony αγγ.) Αλλα όντως δεν έχουμε τρόπο να ξέρουμε την ακριβή προφορά, και αρα κάθε μοντέλο πλην της ιστορικής είναι επισφαλείς.
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Η προφορά των αγγλικών της εποχής της Σέξπιρ διέφερε αρκετά από τη σημερινή βρετανική και άμα ψάξεις θα βρεις απόπειρες ανάγνωσης των έργων με την τότε προφορά. Τώρα αν αυτό θες να το πεις ανούσιο πες το άλλα ασέβεια δεν είναι.
Why to call them Difthongs if you pronounce them like if they weren't... letter Ita pronounced like Epsilon and letter Ipsilon like you? The name of the letter itself shows you what sound makes...and you are soooo lost in the translation...bye.
The pronunciation is more like Modern Greek, because it has been used in the Church for over 2000 years. Erasmian pronunciation is an abomination. Erasmus did't speak like you speak.
Interesting.. but I would suggest you if you want to pronounce correctly Greek ( ancient or new ) study classic literature in in Greece.. and forget Erasmus .. he was not a Greek.
![Conversation: Ancient Greek vs. Modern Greek [SUB ESP]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vDojnOSporE/mqdefault.jpg)
![Conversation: Ancient Greek vs. Modern Greek [SUB ESP]](/img/tr.png)
I'm a philosophy professor, 69 years old, and teach Attic Greek. This is the best video about Attic Greek pronunciation I encountered on UA-cam. Absolutely superb and the most accurate approach to Attic pronunciation.
Thanks for adding your opinion!
I am only starting to learn Ancient Greek, restored Attic. I am quite specific about Attic and keen with best language pronunciation as possible. To you, Ancient Greek professionals, I'd like to submit an idea. A major hurdle in proper language pronunciation acquisition is insufficient access to native speech. This has always been an issue with dead languages (though I like to think that Greek isn't really dead, nor even Latin, to the extent that various linguistic continuities can be found). So here goes my proposal...
Why not take advantage of AI and LLMs, all developments, since some years ago already, to have a software learn and produce a natural sounding Attic Greek, etc. (any language of interest). Such a software could be refined several times, until reaching a version where most experts will agree they are absolutely or near absolutely happy with. Such a product could then be used by restored Attic Greek learners all over the world, listening to endless hours of ancient literature, thereby being able to acquire, if so they wish, a natural sounding Attic Greek. We could partially ressucitate the language and experience the joy of speaking it with near-native ease and pronunciation. At least for those who care this much about pronunciation.
Another application would be making use of recorded native voices, from the purest speakers of each language today at risk of extinction or accelerated degradation (of which there are thousands), so we can teach AI how to speak it, for the benefit of concerned populations. Such a tool could be used to stop and even reverse language degradation and loss in a multitude of places around the world, Europe included.
As a native Catalan speaker, I feel despair at how my language is fast becoming a radically impoverished and transvestite language, where not only words and expressions are lost by the thousands, every decade, but even the phonetics and syntax etc. are quickly being corrupted. Soon, the Spanish political framework and demographics, combined, will make this evolution unstoppable and irreversible. The only way we could prevent such catastrophic change would be some political miracle and/or a technological one, with AI.
Did you ever get ideas about real languages with real pitch accent in action pronounced by native speakers ?
1) Finnish
2) Japanese
3) Classical Arabic
I include also Sanskrit because some speakers can show this caracteristic very clearly into the traditional recitation.
@@cattubuttas4749 , whatever the phonetics of a language, if it is alive, native speaker recordings can be used to train AI systems. Whether it is tonal, has pitch accent, clicks, or whatever.
Sanskrit is alive, but I have no idea how today's real life phonetics are regarded in terms of a standard language. Around 15,000 people in India claim to speak it as their native first language, but how are their pronunciation and other language features regarded? They might be regarded as dialectal or modern, relative to some classical standard. Many more people learn Sanskrit as a second language. But again, how is their pronunciation (or prosody in general) regarded? No idea. Language experts should have a debate, in each case (for each language), about what standard(s) of language it is desirable for an AI system to learn/develop.
Both classical and modern standards seem desirable for some languages. Even dialectical standards. Why not go for everything while we can? Everything is valuable.
I have just started learning Sanskrit, by the way, together with Ancient Greek. I am still learning the alphabet. 😅
@@nomcognom2414 for the "live" languages there is no problem in finding recordings but for Sanskrit I use ASSIMIL recordings which are great for getting an idea. They have free samples of chapter 1, chapter 50 and chapter 100 of the book. Assimil courses recordings for Latin and Ancient Greek are less valuable in particular the Latin ones are very bad, Greek ones barely acceptable.
Wow, the sung examples of the actual ancient music are stunning! Such a good, deep, true study. I take my hat off, wonderful job.
I don't know about any of you, but modern Greek still retains the pitch accent to my ears.
Example from the video being, (from 9:00-10:00)
Μακάριοι οι πτωχοί τώ πνεύματι
Mak'ari `i-i ptoh'i-i t`o-o pne'vmati
Stress accent on the "a" -ri flows into long "i-i" (pronounced "ee"); the "i" from ptohi flows into "to" from high to low and holds on the "o"; then the "eu/ev" is slightly longer from transitioning from the epsilon to the V-sound the ypsilon makes in this position.
Makάrὶ ῖ ptohί-tῶ pnέvmatὶ
Yeah, I've heard whole sections swallowed up in rapid-fire dialogue, but for those that don't run their mouths on high octane you can hear a flow in the language. Like that of going up and down a mountain trail. Maybe it's a regional difference like hearing someone that comes from Kalamata speak versus someone from Thesaly or Pontus. Still, even with that flow, they can talk fast, like Speedy Gonzales fast, and good luck even those well versed in the language, native or taught, to understand everything they say.
"makari i ptohi to pnevmati"
(I swear that's a rich man's guide book to world domination, for if one is to be "blessed" for his "poor spirit," then does that mean his cunning wiles earns him more fortune above the charitable and downtrodden? Jesus said it does when his story promoted the servants that invested his money vs the one that saved it for safe keeping; he got punished for that. Funny lessons in that thing.)
(look up Charles Giuliani truthhertzradio and christendumb)
Modern Greek normally do not distinct length of the vowels, but as a native speaker if I observe it while I read, most likely pitch rules fall into place.
Yes, I think Modern Greek has retained a kind of vestigial pitch accent even if it isn't necessarily done consciously. Certainly it has a very flowing, sing-song quality to it.
This is exactly the type of well researched and clearly presented videos about ancient languages that we've been missing! Great work!
You are an engaging speaker.
Thank you!
Fantastic !!! Fantastic !!! Some two decades ago I worked out a part of this, as follows, though I failed to publish it. So I am glad to see your achievement. Evidently, you have used a wider range of evidence than I did, and you are far more expert than I was. I guess that you have an Australian accent, like mine?
My story is that the scheme must be so simple that a one year old child will naturally master it.
The top and bottom pitches are about a musician's fourth interval apart.
At about 12:00, I would say that the grave is the same as no acute, aka unaccented, as your written note says. It means that the top pitch is maintained, until an acute accent mark comes along; I wouldn't call it transitional.
My fundamental rule is that an acute accent mark is the immediate precursor of an abrupt drop in pitch to the bottom. Consequently, a circumflex is an acute on the first mora, indicating an abrupt drop to bottom pitch on the second mora.
A sentence starts at the mid pitch and immediately proceeds to the top pitch. Then the top pitch is maintained, right through an acutely accented syllable, till immediately after the acute accent mark.
Immediately after the bottom pitch, one goes to the mid pitch and then the top pitch, which is maintained till immediately after the next acute accent mark.
I think this more or less agrees with your scheme. Ready to discuss.
I loved the art on the thumbnail! took me a sec to see the double meaning. great video!!
10:34 I think you're right; circumflex is best described as high -> low, not rising-falling. My understanding is the "rise" is built up through previous morae, and with the circumflex there is a fall.
Hi again. I was re-re-re watching your video as a refresher for vowel length in pronunciation. I listened several times to your Seikilos epitaph. Have you thought about making a recording of the ancient music that we have? I’d pay good money to hear you perform the Homeric poems. You’d be a rockstar!
Thank you, that is a pretty neat idea! I know there are some performers who do a good job of recreating plausible musical settings for Homer's epic poetry. It's really hard to get into the right headspace for doing that though - Ancient Greek music is fundamentally different from Western harmony, and it's like speaking in a different musical language.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010 Plus, we will pay you in obols, so don't get too excited about the money.
Really excellent video! Definitely the best take on this topic in an accessible format on the internet. A couple points:
-You touch on this, but I wouldn't assume that the accented mora must be higher than the preceding mora. Given the musical evidence and given how similarly the pitch accent system works to ancient Greek in languages like Japanese, it's likely that the most salient feature of the accent is the following downstep. Morae preceeding the downstep could probably reach the same height as the accented mora - this really helps explain the grave accent, where what IMO it's really marking is the lack of a following downstep. Thus "θεος ην" is moraically /tʰe.ós é.è.n/, where ós is the same pitch as é, so can't be considered an accute. The tʰe could be lower or approaching the same pitch (this should depend on how emphasized the word is and the prosody of the sentence), and similarly the final mora n would typically say low, but could potentially rise if you want to add, e.g. question intonation.
-I notice that you tend to pronounce words like πάντα as if the ν were part of the first mora, with the downstep on the τα. Although very minor, this is maybe the only thing I'd call a mistake. ν is a sonorant and its own mora, so the downstep should be heard most clearly in the transition from ά to ν. This once again has a very clear parallel in Japanese - /n/ is a mora which can't carry the accent itself, but you will very clearly hear the downstep if there's an accented mora before /n/.
-I briefly mentioned this above, but the single most helpful concept one can take from Japanese to sound natural in Greek IMO is the way things like question intonation interact with accent. The rule is that you can do whatever you want after the accent as long as you don't interfere with the downstep between accent and the following mora. So for instance, θεός has no downstep within the word, so you can pronounce the entire word with a rising question intonation "θεός?" But if you do this with "πάντα" you violate the accent, so what you'd do instead is do the downstep between πά and ν, and then quickly rise on the τα.
As someone with some knowledge of classical Greek and a smattering of Japanese, the difference between the two systems of pitch accent is intriguing. I think I understand it. In Greek, only one mora of a word can receive high pitch, with an obligatory down step on the next mora. In Japanese, that is not the case; indeed, a very common pattern is low-high-high, as in watashi (I/we), which is pronounced wàtáshí. This causes difficulty for English-speaking learners of Japanese, as the tendency is to want to drop the voice after the first high-pitched mora, giving an incorrect pitch contour to the word. Also, Japanese high pitch is normally only one step higher, not a fifth. Attempts to impose an interval of a fifth on Greek produce the effect of someone more than slightly tipsy. If one analyzes Greek pitch accent according to moras, there is no need to talk about pitch contours: a given mora can be either high or not-high; only if a syllable contains a two-mora vocalic core, can there be a pitch rise or fall within a syllable.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of the claim that the pitch was a one-fifth jump! That is pretty high. Though still plausible, at least in theory - if I sound out the Mandarin tones to myself, I can hear that in isolation at least, the high first tone and the low third tone are maybe even a bit more than a fifth apart in pitch. In rapid speech the tones do all kinds of interesting things to each other and probably don't sound as far apart as when someone is demonstrating pitch for pedagogical purposes. If "a musical fifth" was what the grammarians wrote down, then maybe when the Ancient Greek teachers were speaking slowly and emphatically to students it was a fifth interval, but it could have been a bit flatter in rapid speech.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010 I believe Dionysius of Halicarnassas wrote that the pitch accent was confined to an interval of about a fifth. But its assumed he meant that it was never more than that, not that it was always such a jump.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010not to discount the possibility of it being as large as a 5th but in my intuition as someone with basic mandarin and fluent Japanese; tonal languages like mandarin with 4 or more tones have a larger range of frequencies going on than pitch accent languages (based on an admitted sample size of 1 of each lol). In any case i suspect the highest tone and lowest tones of mandarin have around twice the distance between them (maybe more) than the high and low of Japanese. I’m interested in hearing from people from other pitch accent languages.
So actually Japanese is, like Greek, only able to have one accented mora per word. This mora can be higher than surrounding mora, or it can simply be marked with a downstep. The preceding mora aren't really high at a phonological level, but they tend to approach or equal the accented mora in pitch, since it's the downstep that marks the accent, not absolute pitch. It's quite likely that Greek worked the same way given the musical evidence. That is, the accented mora doesn't necessarily need to be higher than the preceding mora, as long as its followed by a downstep. The only phenomenon definitely present in Japanese and probably not present in Greek is that there tends to be a noticeable rise in pitch between the first two morae of the word if the accent is later in the word, which results in transcriptions like the one you gave, 'wàtáshí'. But this is really more noticeable in emphasized words - otherwise, it's really just the downstep that's mandatory. Greek very well may have been exactly the same. As for the idea that the difference in pitch should be of a particular musical interval, this can probably be discounted.
@@mikem9001 I'm not sure we really know what the ancient Greek intervals were. When in Greece I saw the music notation of the Ode to Apollo written on a series of stones and no one as yet has been able to decipher it.
In any case, our span of a 5th is based on the Well-Tempered Clavier of JS Bach and still exists today in modern music. But Greek intervals could be smaller than our 12 steps of the chromatic scale.
Some music from the Middle East uses quarter-tones, and if the Greeks used a system such as that, their chromatic scale might have as many as 27 steps, making a leap of a 5th resembling a span of 2 1/2 steps in our system. It's all highly speculative but it's a possible explanation that would avoid the extraordinarily large, cumbersome leap of our 5th.
Very interesting video. In my Greek linguistics class in uni, my professor told us the pitch accent makes a different of a fifth in pitch and that has always seemed very high to me, but I assumed it was based on sources from Greek grammarians. It seems more doable and natural that how high or low a pitch goes is not always the same.
Thank you! I'm glad this helps provide a practical way to recreate pitch accent! It is still plausible to speak Ancient Greek with a fifth interval rise, but I suspect that in rapid speech it would get flatter. At least, the song melodies in Ancient Greek seem pretty happy to frequently use intervals smaller than a fifth when rising to an acute accent.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus - he probably meant that it was no more than a fifth, not that it was always that far.
I stated this above, but their system of what a fifth is could be different than ours.
@@foundinantiquityancientgre8010
You consistently use exactly a perfect fifth as the interval between the two pitches in this video.
Thank you do much. This is the first time to see the explanation about pitch accents with sound.
I remember trying to do this with Attic Greek 101 on my own when I was taking a class, being disappointed that we didn't try to pronounce it tonally. It was easier to learn orthography and morphology when trying to do a tonal accent rather than a stress. Play and beauty are important to me. I was also inspired listening to Mandarin in the airport to and from break at college. The difficulty was with making sure the higher pitch was not always a consequence of louder pronunciation, so I was trying to keep each syllable at the same volume - does that make sense?
I had a similar experience!
This is a super introduction to the subject, thank you. I love the charming way you pronounce these snippets, with this ever-so-slightly Australian dialect of Greek.
I started learning Ancient Greek about a year ago, with an ancient Teach Yourself book (Kinchin Smith and Melluish).
Since starting I've subsequently started to learn rudiments about the actual pronunciation in Ancient Greece. In fact this TY book explicitly says in the introduction that they're not going to bother with accents "because they're unimportant" ... ! Sadly this also reflects what Allen says in his otherwise very useful book *Vox Graeca*, most of which I've now read: "don't think about trying to get the accents, it's too hard and not worth having such aspirations"!!!
I find these attitudes absolutely bizarre!
I now have a target accent: 5th Century BCE Attica! The "other" challenge there (apart from accents) is the aspirated/unaspirated allophones, τ/θ, κ/χ and π/φ. It's hard but not impossible by any means: I find the best way is to try and speak the unaspirated ones in a sort of Spanish accent, because Spanish has this tendency to swallow accents (i.e. to prefer unaspirated), whereas with English there generally seems to be a mixture of aspirated and unaspirated.
Have you done anything on the unaspirated/aspirated allophones? I had a glimpse at your UA-cam vids but couldn't see anything.
As a German speaker the aspirated allophones are pretty natural to me. It's the unaspirated ones that I have trouble with, contrary to what is often said.
@@firstaidsack I'm an English-speaker and I'd say the same. That's why I mentioned Spanish. My Spanish is rudimentary but I am generally quite good at the mimickry of accents. The first time I ever heard Spanish my reaction was "wow, that's quite hard to follow, as they are swallowing the consonants".
As in most contemporary languages native to Europe and spoken in Europe, there is no allophone issue: a Spanish person could aspirate all their consonants and it wouldn't cause misunderstandings. But I would put money on Ancient Greek's unaspirated consontants having sounded quite Spanish.
I haven't watched the whole video yet, but the melody sounds plausible. Off topic: I think your accent sounds mostly Australian, but I notice that you occasionally pronounce your Rs in the end of at least some words (are, or, there) in the absence of a following vowel, where I wouldn't expect an Australian to do so, whereas an American would. And your Os are occasionally a bit more American-like, too (closer to an Australian 'aw', e.g. in 'low'). I was wondering if you are an Australian immigrant to the United States, or if there is some tendency among young Australians in general to switch to a more American-like accent?
You're probably hearing the Linking R and the Intrusive R of the Australian accent: the rule is that R is pronounced between vowels to keep them separated. So there is no R sound in "are good", but there is in "are awful". This rule applies even to words with no R at the end like "data" or "law", in which case it's called "Intrusive". The same phenomenon exists in UK English and in old US accents like JFK's. I would expect that the more American-style O is due to the influence of having lived in Singapore, since the Singaporean accent has that feature too.
You mention the "AD 50" pronunciation and link to a playlist, which are private videos. I would be interested in checking it out. You definitely speak the language nicely.
This is a brilliant, innovative, and easily applicable analysis… very well done!
The point about how all of these rules orbit around creating a very particular pitch-rhythm in was so insightful I was genuinely shocked. it’s made understanding why and what is going on easy and almost intuitive.
Also, in your pragmatically reading a grave as an acute section, it’s almost as though the pitch is being spread out over two vowels in different words, in order to add extra emphasis. I can imagine ēn actually retaining the falling accent to further emphasize the word “God” by contrasting its rising pitch
Thanks for this presentation. I found it clear, logical and informative. It's very exciting to discover pitch: it makes Attic Greek so much more exciting to try and speak than it was when I was trying to learn the stress accent! Thanks also for the links at the end of your presentation.
When is foundinantiquity Classical Chinese coming 👀
Ενδιαφέρον βίντεο για τον τονισμό! Ευχαριστώ Κάρλα!
χάριν σοι έχω!
Thanks a lot for the superb explanation. It is so inspiring ! So as you have said it takes 2 morae (instead of just 1) in a syllable in order to make pitch accents possible.
Great content!
Thank you!
Did you ever get ideas about real languages with real pitch accent in action pronounced by native speakers ?
1) Finnish
2) Japanese
3) Classical Arabic
I include also Sanskrit because some speakers can show this caracteristic very clearly into the traditional recitation.
A very helpful and informative video. Thank you so much!
I’m glad you made this video. It’s great to see more accessible educational resources available on this topic. Hopefully it’ll encourage more students to embrace the pitch accent rather than be scared off without even attempting to understand it first. As you say, embracing the pitch offers a more realistic and euphonic sound and helps disambiguate words that would otherwise be homophones.
Also, I have a question about ἄνθρωπός. Why is there an accent on the antepenult and the ultima? I’ve only seen the word with the accent on the antepenult, but I’ve also only studied Attic. Is that a Koine thing or something else?
Thank you! With άνθρωπός εστιν, the word following άνθρωπος is 'εστιν' which is an 'enclitic' or basically a word which usually lacks an accent. Enclitics do weird things to the accents around them because they kind of combine with the previous word to make a super long word, and that sometimes means the preceding word gets a second accent on it.
What she said! I would dare to add, that I find it helps to think of the last part of the word as separated off and joined with the following enclitic. So it becomes "anthrop osestin". You are probably already used to reading "de" as almost joined with the word it follows, so this is really just the reverse process. I don't claim to have any great knowledge about this, but I've just found it makes the two raised pitch accents fit well together.
I have been looking for a comfirmation like this since I was 13. So I was no fool when I tried to pronounce ancient Greek with pitch accent at school. My teacher said it was undoable. As a Dutchman, I could pronounce the ypsilon and almost all the dyphtongs already. Our equivalent of /eu/, written as /ui/, is rare. Later studying Czech helped me to pronounce early /ou/. I learnt the aspirates from initial English and German voiceless stops and the accents from Chinese. Maybe the circumflex was rising and falling after all. If so, its writing follows its pitch contour. English speakers make the sound when intonating, for example, the interjection 'wow' that way, and Dutch speakers make the sound when saying 'ja' to express joy. However, the Mandarin Chinese equivalent is easier for me to pronounce.
The word αάατος as others really breaks the rules that are based on weird accents of letters and the idea of diphthongs being pronounced as proposed. One has to make a mess out of many things in the language to accommodate ideas such as Ita or Ipsilon being a long E and OU sounds, especially when the names of the letters say it in their name, its EE that has some characteristic they call TA, whereas the other one is called EE psilon, high pitch EE, but they’re talking us it’s OU because Germans and English pronounce the letter that way.
please record fully recitations of greek classics
Excellent video! Great explanations.
How is Zeus pronounced in ancient classical Greek say from 500 BC?
12:22 - omg, the names are the same as 4 French accents ...
Yoy.. this reminds me of a self talk after seeing a video ith (short) two in a car comparing ith french w swedish (?) Or ith the comparisson just started in my mind... but it was sth on the pitches... (& ith french has sth like it tho more subtly, or it used to have in older times??)
I keep writing the answer to somebody and double check if it has been posted. I get acknowledged that the answer has been posted and I can read it but it is still getting deleted all the times. There are no offesnsive words in my answer what's the problem with it ? I just mention a good languages publisher and that s it....WHAT'S WRONG with it ???
Unfortunately yt has a censor bot that auto deletes our comments based on somewhat arbitrary word choices that aren't even remotely offensive most of the times
Τὴν μὲν γλῶσσαν μεμαθηκώς, νῦν δ' ἅμα σοῦ τὸ μυστικὸν τοῦ τόνου οἶδα. Εὐχαριστῶ σοι.
What an excellent video! Thanks
This is the first time ever I have seen the tonal system of ancient Greek. It has many similarities to Serbian. Makes me wonder if there were some linguistic substrata transferred.
Unique video! Amazing 😀
Thanks! 😃
Very informative, thank you
Glad it was helpful!
7:26 - ith this one is kinda like in French when you have the linking of words în sound like in ...
Oh no example comes to me... but if you know (any) French, you know what I mean...
Pitch accent s also part of Swedish
The reason I couldn't carry on with it (well one of the reasons) ith its not that wide in there, but pretty overwhelming for a girl who speaks shyly... while trying my luck at swedish I realised you need real confidence to start speaking 4 real a lang like that... (similarly with chinese much earlier, tho felt more overwhelming...)
However if you really wanted to emphasize the composite quality of circumflex accents you might also need to emphasize the origin of those consecutive vowels. For example the 2nd declension genitive singular would need to be explained (as in Mycenaean and Homer) as -óyo, hence a circumflex when the two vowels contracted. The same for the infinitive ending -ein, which is apparently for uncontracted -ehen. The same goes for contract verbs in Attic.
How does a word like γένηται fit into the high/low/neutral pattern where you describe there being only up to one neutral mora? Isn’t αι long and therefore doesn’t this word contain two neutral morae within the αι ending?
It’s because some of the ”diphthongs” were actually /aj/ instead of /ai/ 😊
Grave is thus explicit neutral tone?
Was ancient Greek spoken with 21st-century Vocal Fry?
I consider this a well deserved comment.
can someone please say the name of the font used in the video
Regarding reading graves as accutes: In mandarin stress on a grave accent (corresponding to ̌ ) happens all the time. 好的 (hǎo de), which means "alright", is often heavily stressed on the first syllable for example. Most swedish dialects have it as well in their pitch accent, so you'd pronounce "iris" as "ī̀ris".
This is exciting! I'm a specialist of pitch-accent in Biblical Hebrew.
Interesting. What can you tell us about pitch-accent in Biblical Hebrew?
@geoffgjof There are different dialects according to population/rite. But each of them have a way of connecting the sound of semantically joined words and of separating ideas... and then of also relating ideas to and from one another, and of highlighting.
Helpful! Thank you!
The way we use stress accent, we always drop pitch on the accented syllable. Using this on καρδιά and ημέρα sends the pitch in the wrong direction. I am using Erasmian pronunciation with pitch tones (with a Greek accent!) and it’s not at all difficult. And as I’ve noted before, the difference between a well done Erasmian pronunciation and a well done Lucian pronunciation is as small as the difference between a Canadian accent and an American one.
PS: Have I mentioned how much I appreciate your videos? (Both Greek and Latin!) And I loved the music and the way you used it to illustrate the pitch accent!
Thank you for your kind words! I do agree, a well-executed Erasmian is not very different at all in practice to a well-executed Lucian or Attic pronunciation. It's nice to hear you're using pitch accent with your Erasmian.
In Greece we never read ancient greek like this. We use the modern greek pronunciation to read ancient greek, in schools and universities, which I begin to doubt as an accurate way of reading AG...
It isn't.
It's not a historical way. Not historical doesn't necessarily mean inaccurate.
Several still spoken European languages still have a pitch accent: Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovenian, Swedish, etc. Why not base ancient Greek pitch accent upon a comparison with these living Indo-Germanic languages, rather than on the totally unrelated Chinese?
Being Swedish I make a distiction between ánden the wild duck and ànden the spirit. Undortunately I am deaf to the Latvian and Lithuanian accents!
It’s not. Chinese is being used an example, but it’s not what the Greek is based off (especially when you remember that Chinese doesn’t actually include its tones in song as did Greek).
Is there a summary of learned Koine pronunciation anywhere?
Sometimes you pronunce the closed vowels as the open ones.
Thanks for this better look at Greek.
Thanks! Will try to use this system for old church slavonic 😊
Restored by whom ?
As a sudent of classical Greek 1954-58 we had to pronounce the acute and grave accents.
Very nice! But you pronounce diphthongs with Upsilon (Υυ) the modern way, which is not consistent to the rest of your pronunciation. They were not pronounced with “V” but with “U”.
αυ = au, not av
ευ = eu, not ev
ηυ = ēu (roughly), not ēv
ᾱυ = āu, not āv
ου was as early as in the 5th century AC already monophthongized from ou to ū (roughly) (like ει did from ei to ī, roughly again)
We pronounce this second vowel as V in modern Greek also, but this is by no means a diphthong (it contains only one vowel), nor a monophthong (it contains two sounds). It could be better described as a digraph.
Thus the accentuation in ευ was in classical times different from what you pronounce, in that: pitch contour concerns also the u sound contained in the diphthong; you present ευ as consisting of a long vowel and a fricative consonant, but (such) consonants cannot have a pitch contour (and that is why you are by instinct performing the pitch on the vowel forcing it to be long).
So:
εῦ = éù
εύ = eú
ηῦ = eéù
ηύ = eeú
In koine (Hellenistic) ev and av did occur, but by then prosody was almost completely lost in oral speech acts, thus pronouncing like in previous periods is pretty inaccurate.
It's like counting music!
10:04
8:08 - the more interesting part is trying to understand it when you dk what's written there 😂 (in ppl's minds, if anything...)
In ppls minds**, lol why I cant lately edit comments, altho it shows edited😢...
Why do you prefer learned koine over Lucian?
Learn the only real pronouciation which is
The Greek of native speakers all others are artificial and hypothetical. Greek language is a living language and still the same language and not other like Latin and Italian which is different languages.
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας nonsense, it hath changed greatly over time
@@strongbutthead the only nonsense here is to try to pronounce a language with an accent that never exist and native speakers don't do
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Trying to pronounce classical Greek in a modern Greek way is artificial and hypothetical. Be guided by science, rather than by unthinking prejudice.
@@mikem9001 What science you ape, we have zero ways of knowing how they sounded like. Best we can do is pronounce them by how we speak today.
Mandarin does not have a pitch accent, it has tonemes.
Given that pitch accents may well have been dead by then anyway, especially one imagines in non-native communities like the Jews of the Levant (not talking about Josephus, we’re talking about like “John”), it makes no sense to me to read New Testament Greek in this way tbh…
You should learn what a diaeresis is οι is pronounced eeh not ohee. It is only pronounced ohee if there is an diaeresis over the ιοτα. Otherwise ohee is written ωι. Modern Greeks pronounce the words like ancient Greeks there has never been a change unless you can specifically point when the change happened.
Today I learned that I am incapable of singing
Just copy it from Vedic Sanskrit where there is an unbroken oral tradition that exists since the Vedic times
👍
Why does it sound like I'm listening to Japanese.
Not gonna lie, I find the tones in Mandarin difficult enough, let alone the pitches in Classical Greek. I love the idea of trying to reconstruct the pitches, but probably because of my modern cultural background, I find the pitches a little un-natural feeling. I am not saying it is unnatural, I am saying it 'feels' unnatural to me. For people who have learnt to speak this way, did it feel unnatural at the start? How long did it take to get used to it? On the topic of Buth's system, I do suspect some lengthened vowels are needed to work practically with his system, for example, in real life, consider a need to distinguish between the -ομεν and -ωμεν subjunctive endings. I don't think Buth ever discusses this specific practical issue in any of his works, but it seems to be a natural conclusion to me that a practical first century reconstruction would have retained some elements of vowel/syllable lengthening during the transitional period.
Συγγνώμη αλλα θέλω να μου πει κάποιος έναν σοβαρό λόγο για τι να προφέρει κάποιος έτσι τα ελληνικά. Αντί να χρησιμοποιήσει την ιστορική προφορά;
μα η ιστορική προφορά της ελληνικής ήταν μελωδική όπως αυτή που έχει σήμερα η νορβηγική ή ιαπωνική.
@@velvetcroc9827 1⁰ με τον όρο "ιστορική προφορά" αναφερόμαστε σ' αυτή που μιλάμε και σήμερα, ενώ με τους όρους (artificial, reconstructive, hypothetical) αναφερόμαστε στις τεχνίτες (ψεύτικες) προφορές που προσπαθούν να αποδώσουν υποθετικά την προφορά της αρχαίας, πράγμα αδύνατο διότι δεν υπήρχε μαγνητόφωνο εκείνη την εποχή.
2⁰ για την νορβηγική δεν γνωρίζω αλλά τουλάχιστον για ιαπωνικά έχω να πω ότι δεν έχουν καμία προσωδία.
3⁰ δυστυχώς όταν προσπαθούμε να μιμηθούμε άκριτα κάτι που δεν ξέρουμε, μοιάζουμε περισσότερο με μίμους. και αν κάποιος αρχαίος Έλληνας μας άκουγε μάλλον θα γέλαγε. Αλλά εκτός των άλλων είναι και ασέβεια προς την ελληνική γλώσσα και τους Έλληνες να μιλάει κάποιος τα ελληνικά έτσι ακατάληπτα, ειναι το ίδιο με το να διαβάζει κάποιος το Σέξπιρ και αντί π.χ. για made (μέιντ) να διαβάζει (μαδε)
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Πάτα Japanese pitch accent για να καταλαβαίνεις τι εννοούμε με τον όρο μελωδική προφορά. Εσύ για ποιό λόγο νομίζεις ότι εφευρέθηκε το πολυτονικό σύστημα; Έτσι για ομορφιά; Και δεν χρειαζόμαστε κανένα μαγνητόφωνο. Υπάρχουν πάμπολλες αποδείξεις από την γραμματεία (έχουμε μέχρι και αρχαίους γραμματικούς που μας εξηγούν οι ίδιοι κάποια πράγματα), τις επιγραφές καθώς και την ίδια την επιστήμη της γλωσσολογίας.
@@velvetcroc9827 (παρακαλώ διάβασε το όλο πριν απαντήσεις, αλλα και το προηγούμενο γιατί συμπλήρωνα κατι ενω απάντησες) Δεν είπα οτι τα αρχαία ελληνικά δεν είχαν προσωδία αλλα τα ιαπωνικά (άλλο το pitch accent δλδ τονισμός άλλο προσωδία)(εν πάση περιπτώσει δεν είναι το θέμα προς συζήτηση). Ουτε είπα οτι η προφορά έχει μείνει ατόφια τρείς χιλιάδες χρόνια. Είπα πως όλες αυτές η προφορές εκκλίνουν της πραγματικότητας. Τώρα όσον αφορά τις γλωσσολογικές αποδείξεις οι περισσότερες καταρρίπτουν της ερασμιακές προφορές (συν ο ίδιος ο Έρασμος) παραδείγματα: (Γαία αλλα γεωγραφία, γεωλογία κτλ) (εικόν>icon λατ. Ουρανός>Uranus λατ. Βο-ος συναίρεση βους αλλα δωρικός βως) (ω,ουF>j>∅) οι δίφθογγοι φαίνεται να προκύπτουν μόνο απο την ένωση με το F.
όσο για τους αρχαίους συγγραφείς ο Θουκυδίδης αναφέρει ότι τον λιμό τον μπέρδεψαν με τον λοιμό αρα δεν υπάρχει αμφιβολία ότι τουλάχιστον το οι είχε μονοφθογγιστεί . Για να ειμαι ακριβοδίκαιος ναι φαίνεται πως υπάρχει κάποια βάση ως προς τα υ και η αλλα δεν είμαστε σίγουροι για την ακριβή φωνητική τούς αξία το (η) ηταν μάλλον ενδιάμεσο ε και ι ή το υ μάλλον ενδιάμεσο κλειστό ο και ι ή ο και ου. Και πρέπει να θυμόμαστε ότι οι αρχαίοι δεν είχαν εναν τρόπο προφοράς, αλλα οτι αυτή μπορούσε να διαφέρει απο λέξη σε λέξη, πόλη σε πολη και άτομο σε άτομο. Λοιπόν όπως είναι εμφανές η γλωσσολογία δεν μπορεί να μας διασαφήνισει την ακριβή φωνητική αξία αλλά μόνο τις διαφοροποιήσεις που υπάρχουν μεταξύ τούς. Οπότε η φράση (δεν είχαν κασετόφωνο) δεν ειναι ειρωνική (btw irony αγγ.) Αλλα όντως δεν έχουμε τρόπο να ξέρουμε την ακριβή προφορά, και αρα κάθε μοντέλο πλην της ιστορικής είναι επισφαλείς.
@@ΕυσταθίοςΔραγώνας Η προφορά των αγγλικών της εποχής της Σέξπιρ διέφερε αρκετά από τη σημερινή βρετανική και άμα ψάξεις θα βρεις απόπειρες ανάγνωσης των έργων με την τότε προφορά. Τώρα αν αυτό θες να το πεις ανούσιο πες το άλλα ασέβεια δεν είναι.
This is easy for Asian people. Also easy for me.
Why to call them Difthongs if you pronounce them like if they weren't... letter Ita pronounced like Epsilon and letter Ipsilon like you? The name of the letter itself shows you what sound makes...and you are soooo lost in the translation...bye.
Lol that's what I get for studying Japanese
Thank you so much, that was a great explanation and demonstration.
The pronunciation is more like Modern Greek, because it has been used in the Church for over 2000 years. Erasmian pronunciation is an abomination. Erasmus did't speak like you speak.
That's Byzantine Greek, stupid. Not Ancient Greek.
Thanks a million! I have severe insomnia. This presentation put me asleep in 30 seconds.
Modern Greeks are really lucky they don't have pitch accent anymore, I'm a Japanese speaker but pitch accent is really a pain in the ass tbh
Interesting.. but I would suggest you if you want to pronounce correctly Greek ( ancient or new ) study classic literature in in Greece.. and forget Erasmus .. he was not a Greek.
I feel like putting emphasis on the ἦν is equally "shocking":
"And God WAS the word."