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gemsofgreece · 8 months

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Most unpopular opinion ever:

it was unnecessary to ditch the vareia (grave accent) in the monotonic system because its rules are super easy and it is essentially still used in our speech.

Okay, before you throw eggs at me, hear me out for a moment!

Thoughts on Greek intonation by someone who's NOT a linguist:

For instance, you stress differently the word “γιατί” in the examples below, don’t you?

Γιατί ρωτάς;

Γιατì θέλω να ξέρω.

In the second example, γιατι and να take the grave accent and I am assuming you do put the stress on them less or somehow differently than in θέλω and ξέρω, right? In fact, γιατι in the second sentence has a somewhat "dragged", "falling" stress while θέλω and ξέρω have sudden rising, emphasizing stresses. The γιατι of the first sentence follows the stress patern of these two verbs rather than its own self in the second phrase!

And in more regular cases:

Ο καλος και σοφος γονιος.

Of course you stress all the words, however if you had to choose one word in this phrase where you feel your stress or pitch should be naturally (and not intentionally or emphatically) raised, which would you say it is?

If you chose γονιος, then check how it would be in a bi-tonic system:

Ο καλòς καì σοφòς γονιός.

Therefore your “instinctive” pronunciation was correct and γονιός is where you go for the acute stress.

And now this. Let's suppose you say the phrase above slightly modified:

Ο καλος και εξυπνος γονιος.

Pronounce this phrase naturally but carefully. Notice your most natural intonation. Does it seem like the "εξυπνος γονιος" part comes out of your mouth a little more emphasized than the "Ο καλος και" part?

If so, check how it would be in a bi-tonic system:

Ο καλòς καì έξυπνος γονιός.

So, once more, you employed the vareia without realising it.

And again. See these two phrases.

Ο έξυπνος καì καλòς γονιός.

BUT

Ο έξυπνος καì καλòς γονιòς θέλει να σε βοηθήσει.

Say these phrases without minding the stresses. And then look at them. In the first one, the words έξυπνος and γονιός slightly overshadow the second adjective, «καλός». In the second phrase on the other hand, the stress in the word γονιος also weakens to the benefit of the second part of the phrase «θέλει να σε βοηθήσει». That is because there is no period after γονιος so it returns to its natural grave accent.

Say the phrases again, naturally but carefully. Doesn’t γονιος sound a little different in the way you say it in each phrase?

If you stressed έξυπνος more than καλός in both phrases and if you emphasised the first and last part in the second phrase more than the middle part, then you did use the vareia!

The rules of the vareia are so simple, you just put it in all words which are stressed in the last syllable and are not followed by a punctuation mark, as the Greek speech is raised in the end and in all non-last stressed syllables. There are of course some irregularities but they are very easy to remember and predict i.e «δεν» would take the acute and not the grave because its whole point is to stress the negation, it wouldn’t make sense to remove the emphasis from it.

One more exception is the ellipsis (…), before which the grave is retained

i.e Είναι ζωηρò… αγόρι.

This example might help you single out better the falling, dragging effect of the grave accent because it is like it happens in slow motion before the ellipsis.

So, the concept of the differentiation between the grave and the acute is extant in the modern pronunciation and it is so easy that even the argument of “unnecessary difficulty” doesn’t stand. I mean, it’s not the same case as with (my otherwise beloved) perispomeni (circumflex) and the spirits which do not exist in our pronunciation anymore (technically psili, the smooth spirit, exists though but it makes no sense to use it as it only implied the absence of the daseia, the aspirate, which is not used anymore at all).

Of course, the differentiation between the grave and acute stress is not anywhere as prominent in Modern than it is in Ancient. On the other hand, the realisation that this is something that does exist in Modern Greek and we take it so much for granted that we don’t realise it (but it becomes clearer when people speak more slowly, carefully and beautifully, with a lot of vocabulary and more complex grammar) might as well suggest that a lot of the theories as to how exactly the stress accents were used in the ancient language border on not being very realistic. I have heard it all; that casual speech had huge pitch and stress transitions like o kalos ke sofos goNIOOOOOOOOS or that if you also added vowel lenth in the equation it was exactly like singing i.e KEH-EH-eh-eh-pos. I mean, that's all very nice, but Greek has very long words and many syllables for this to be entirely realistic in casual everyday speech, unless it took them the whole afternoon to say a couple of sentences. Maybe that's why the Spartans became laconic after all!

Hold the eggs a little more. Please.

The thing is, there is a lot of research in academia about how Greek was an extremely and uniquely musical language which operated with a pitch accent system. Most of the evidence from which the linguists derive their conclusions are Greek authors praising their own language as "pure music". And some Romans, who liked everything Greek anyway. Meanwhile, there is next to none study on Modern Greek intonation, that child of a lesser god. And yet, the wiki page for modern intonation says this:

Variable (phonologically unpredictable) stress. Stressed syllables are longer or louder.

Okay let me weigh in on this. Modern Greek indeed has a dynamic stress system, where the amplitude raises in the stress. However, as I showed above, there are drops inside a sentence as well. Furthermore, syllables in some accents and dialects can indeed be dragged or cut off. Greek is also highly vocally inflected, which means that besides the regular stress of each word, there is also a stress generally in the part of the phrase that has to be emphasized based on the context. That acute is louder than the other acutes and it can also be embellished with sometimes strong musicality, which varies depending on whether the phrase has a question, wonder, sarcasm, anger, tenderness and so on. In fact, Greek is similar to English on this aspect. They use similar notes and patterns to express those emotions. And of course, in order to achieve all this, there is pitch intonation, except it is secondary to the dynamic intonation. In simple words, the pitch is raised in the dynamically stressed syllables and often lowered in the would-be vareia stressed or the non-stressed syllables. However, it is secondary and often overshadowed by the dynamic stress, except in more emotional speech, when it becomes much more prominent. In an unemotional even speech, like reading loudly a book as a chore, it is often too weak to notice. But this might be an explanation about why there are conflicting opinions on modern intonation with many people attesting to modern Greek's expressiveness / melody while others appear condescending that Greek lost its ancient musicality.

Which brings me to some thoughts about ancient intonation. Again, of course it was way more prominent than any pitch intonation Modern may retain. No doubt whatsoever. It was prominent enough that it absolutely needed its own stress marks. This prominence in Modern has been lost on enough that someone has to make posts asking "Do YOU say it like that too?". (That's me.) So yeah there is a considerable difference. But I think the answer might lie in taking the modern intonation and dramatizing it, putting more emphasis on the transitions and lowering the vareia even more. And again realise that researchers blow conclusions out of proportion.

You see, the thing is Greek in all its eras is structured in a way that makes dynamic intonation make more sense than pitch intonation. That is because Greek words do NOT change meaning with a pitch shift! Pitch accent is really important in languages with very short words, often one syllabled ones, where the pitch change makes people realise the differences in the meaning. Greek has long words. Sometimes really long. And words that are written identically, besides being very rare, CAN NOT take different accents 99% of the time because the accents in Greek obey to grammatical rules based on the word's structure!!! Therefore a dynamic stress can help way more than a pitch one in such cases, which seems redundant.

This makes me assume the pitch intonation in Ancient Greek was mainly stylised and secondarily functional. Besides, all testaments and linguists draw conclusions based on famous authors, aoidoi (bards), poets and rhetors. It wouldn't surprise me if the high musicality and use of pitch was a form of art or used by rhetors EXACTLY because a rhetor's job was to enrapture audiences with his speech. But now, imagine two farmers in the mountains arguing while having to use 10-12 lettered words and apply all rules of pitch shifts let alone all long vowels and short vowels and diphthongs (especially in the way academia likes to imagine them) in rapid successions! Do you understand why I believe it is not realistic at all? And even if the farmers did argue like that, I cannot for the life of me imagine how on earth this noise could sound impressive to anybody. (Do you like the sound of west academia's Greek by the way? Does it sound like it deserves all that ancient praise? If not, maybe it's time for a re-evaluation? Food for thought.)

People had started diverging from it in the 2nd century already. But what if it was not exactly "divergence" but rather, access of more "commoners" to writing and more eloquent speaking, who were the ones to spread the use of a simpler, dynamic intonation at the expense of the musical, pompous (but certainly beautiful), intonation of poets, bards and rhetors of the past centuries? I mean, what if we had the actual regular and previously undocumented speech invade the written high forms of Greek, to the dread of the contemporary scholars who had to come up with the polytonic system to rescue the high language from this "corruption"? It is an established fact after all that Byzantine scholars were trying desperately for centuries to retain archaic forms of the language to the growing annoyance of the public, who as time passed must have naturally had more and more access to literary and scholarly work.

In short, what I am suggesting is that Modern Greek has a dynamic stress yet also a secondary pitch intonation, while retaining archaic elements in a much weaker form. Ancient Greek, especially high Greek, Attic and poetic or rhetoric speech, had pitch accent yet also must have employed dynamic stress secondarily. Colloquial ancient Greek or other less known dialects could be in between with more even use of pitch and dynamic intonations.

And also, that vareia has not died yet! Vareia LIVES… it holds on for dear life but it still lives!

PS: I just found it funny that one argument for Ancient Greek's pitch intonation is that the stresses follow the notes in this ancient song,

because if you read this with the supposedly exclusively dynamic modern pronunciation it absolutely still follows the same notes, especially if you use the phrase part emphasizing and emotional stress I described above. The major difference is in the circumflex. But if you know Greek and listen to Greek music, you will realise that the melodies or the phrases follow each other's intonation very seamlessly.

OK, now you can throw your eggs if that was so... audacious. I am not a linguist, which probably makes my audacity even greater, but I genuinely believe I contemplated this based on common sense. If not, at least throw the egg politely, my object was just to find a truth that seems and sounds realistic enough...!

#greece #Greek #Greek language #languages #language stuff #linguistics #langblr #Greek facts #opinion #greek grammar #modern Greek #Ancient Greek #if you tell me you are not hearing any difference I am rioting #vareia love #in this blog we love vareia #tw long post #tw long text #tw long

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maifos · 6 days

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Since I heard her name I couldn't get the similarities between Galicea (fantasy high) and Galatea (Greek mythology). The myth of Galatea is basically that an incredibly skilled sculptor was incredibly repulsed by the idea that women could speak and express themselves, but he still wanted a girlfriend so he made a marble statue and named her Galatea (Roughly translate to white as milk). But he soon realized that a less comfortable body pillow wasn’t the best option for a fulfilling relationship so he asked Aphrodite for help. The goddess then transformed Galatea into a real woman who, unfortunately, could talk and have emotions and opinions so their whole thing kind of fell apart. All this to say, I think this myth of Galatea where she is only accepted when she follows a very strict set of rules laid out for her by the person who is supposed to love her, has some very intriguing parallels to Galacea the “werewolf moon” goddess, being forced into just “moon” goddess she isn’t by her followers, who only accept her as a restricted version of herself that can’t express the werewolf aspect of her divinity.

I don’t know if this was intentional on Brennan's part, but considering there have been a lot of different parallels with characters with greek myth inspired/adjacent names i wouldnt put it past him. Either way I hope we get to see more interactions between Cassandra and Galicea because I wanna know what their sibling relationship was. Were they on good terms? Was it another Abernant situation? What did Galacea think of Ankarna? How did Galicea react when her sister became the nightmare king? Did she know? I need the rest of the season to drop tomorrow. I swear to god I wanna know everything KNOW!

#fhjy spoilers #galicaea #ankarna #cassandra #If you coment on my spelling on any of these names i'll be upset #or just my spelling/grammar in general #Non first language enligsh/dyslexia combo is rough #kristen applebees #I like greek mythology and the amount of refrences this season is everything to me #I also have some thoughts on Beardsly giving Cassandra the name of the greek myhtological figure WHO WAS LITERALY NEVER BELIVED #Intentional or not #Sure cassandra was cursed to be a prophet that nobody belived to tell the truth #But our Cassandra is a goddes who is having a really hard time making people belive (in) her #Also a goddess of mystery and doubt being named after mythological figure who was doubted #i'll stop with these tags now oml thats a lot

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