Re: [tied] Re: Underlying Circumflex in Greek

----- Original Message -----

From: Richard Wordingham

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 4:53 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Underlying Circumflex in Greek

> Incidentally, does anyone know why the accents are written over the second element of a diphthong rather than the stressed component?

 

The traditional notation of accents in Greek has a complex and still partly obscure history. Early experiments at selective accent-marking were apparently systematised by the Alexandrian grammarians of the Hellenistic period (when Greek was already switching to a stress system) -- especially, according to tradition, by Aristophanes of Byzantium. The system used by modern editors was codified by Byzantine grammarians (Theodosius, ca. AD 400) and came into use when no Greek speaker distinguished the accents in ordinary speech. Don't tell anybody, but some of its aspects (namely, some of the rules of accentual sandhi) are surely artificial and _don't_ reflect features of Ancient Greek as evidenced by earlier sources.

 

The distinction between acute and circumflex was certainly important in Ancient Greek, apparently having a shibboleth value, among other things. The most famous slip was made by the actor Hegelochus, who while acting the part of Orestes (279) said <galê:n horô:> instead of <galé:n' horô:> (probably due to his being a non-native speaker of Athenian RP), thus turning the sentence "After the waves [storm] I see a calm again" into something like "I see a weasel [or "ferret": <galê> from contracted <galée:>] again, emerging from the waves". The comic poets ridiculed the poor beggar ad nauseam, but in this simple way he became the best-known actor of ancient Greece.

 

Piotr