Talk:Ancient Greek phonology

message: "The metres used in Classical Greek poetry are based on the patterns of light" hillarious. --62.90.23.122 (talk) 12:57, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  metrical evidence 

message: For example, in Cyrillic, the letter В (ve) stands for [v], confirming that beta was pronounced as a fricative by the 9th century AD, while the new letter Б (be) was invented to note the sound [b]. Conversely, in Gothic, the letter derived from beta stands for [b], so in the 4th century AD, beta was still a plosive in Greek.
Wait a second! For a long time, β was used to transcribe /b/, /v/ and sometimes /w/ of foreign names without distinction. The emperor Valentinianus ended up as Βαλεντινιανός.* The Slavic languages have both /b/ and /v/, so the invention of Cyrillic forced a decision, and there it turns out that /v/ was a better match. But Gothic only had a single phoneme in that place, something that was [b] behind /m/ and perhaps word-initially and [β] or [v] elsewhere. This actually shows up in Gothic spelling because of a Gothic innovation, word-final devoicing, which merged this phoneme into /f/, never into /p/. So, the pronunciation of β must have been close to one of the voiced allophones of that Gothic phoneme, but not necessarily to the plosive one (which was, furthermore, comparatively rare).
I guess it's also possible that β itself had such allophones for some time.
*...which may or may not tell us something interesting about Latin, namely that v had changed from [w] to [v] sometime between him and whichever Valerius it was that ended up as Οὐαλεριός.
David Marjanović (talk) 20:36, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, not quite: if you look at the early forms of Cyrillic, you will confirm that Cyrillic У takes its shape not from Greek upsilon as such, but from the contemporary Greek ου-ligature (with the two branches of the upsilon on top of the o), written in Cyrillic as ꙋ. This was only graphically simplified to "У" at a later date, and thus the modern glyph just happens to look the same as Greek/Latin Y. The actual Greek upsilon was borrowed into early Cyrillic as the letter Izhitsa, which had exactly the same two functions as modern Greek upsilon: either an [i] sound or the [v] sound in the combinations "αυ, ευ". Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:12, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison with younger/derived alphabets 

message: ...just... wow. :-(
Good, he mentions a few real problems, for instance the fact that hundreds of theologians think they're using a classical pronunciation when in fact they can't understand each other; the fact that it's often implicitly assumed that all sound changes happened, if not all at the same time, then still all after every book of the New Testament was written; and a few more.
Also, Caragounis does not claim that, say, Homer used exactly modern pronunciation. He does allow for a few sound changes, he just puts them way earlier than anyone else (and denies the rest).
He doesn't always immediately jump to conclusions either; sometimes he explains potential caveats to his own ideas.
Finally, sometimes his confusion just highlights the confusion of other people: scholars of Greek, and Indo-Europeanists, use the term "pitch accent" in a completely different way than phonologists! The latter use it for languages where the stressed syllable of every word has one of at least two phonemic tones, while the pitches of all other syllables are predictable. Ancient Greek may marginally count as one (the difference between acute and circumflex was phonemic, see below, but only on long vowels and diphthongs), but not because its stressed syllables had higher pitch than the unstressed ones. Swedish, Japanese and Shanghainese are pitch-accent languages.
However, he's a theologian, not a linguist, and it shows. It shows again and again and again. He has no clue of phonetics, not knowing there's a difference between diphthongs and vowel clusters (guess why!), and even going so far as to *headdesk* assume in his explanation of what [γ] is that [j] is literally a sequence of [γ] and [i] (you have 3 guesses about why he believes so, and the first 2 don't count). He has no clue about the existence of aspirated consonants in the world; I wonder what his English sounds like, and whether he has ever noticed. He flatly denies that vowel length was ever phonemic, failing to mention any evidence other than the claim that it's "natural" for Greek to pronounce all vowels with the same length. *headdesk* He claims the letter digamma was pronounced [v], mentioning neither evidence nor the very existence of the usual opinion that it was [w] instead (...which would totally trounce the point he's trying to make), and he does not seem to know that the Latin v was pronounced [w] well into Classical times either. He implies that Latin transcriptions of Greek are based on the very earliest spelling conventions of Greek, failing to take into account all the evidence that the Romans had no respect for foreign spellings and only wanted to indicate the pronunciation: ει turns into i, never ei, ου turns into u, never ou – indeed, in graffiti, φ changes ph to f in the 2nd century, as the article says, and this completely trounces his point. In Pompeii there's a mention of a Pilipphus; clearly, the author of that graffito, native speaker of a language (whether Latin, Oscan or both) with a /f/ but without aspirated consonants, simply had no idea where to put the aspiration and ended up putting it on the /p/ that was already "strengthened" because it was lengthened! (Sorry, forgot the citation.) He has never heard of assimilatory voicing, nor of the spelling rule that does the same for aspiration in Ancient Greek and is ignored in plenty of inscriptions, and instead implicitly takes assimilatory fricativization for granted several times... even in front of λ, which clearly never was a fricative in the history of Greek. Oops, turns out he even says "sounded voiced" (endnote 69) when he means "pronounced as a fricative"; he must have been misunderstanding everyone else, then. *headdesk* He resorts to an unevidenced claim of "physiologically easier" at one point. He *headdesk* uses Nietzsche as an example of a word with an incredible consonant cluster, having evidently no clue that the five letters tzsch stand for nothing more than [t͡ʃ]! (The z is a 16th-century affectation. – 3 of the 4 additional examples in endnote 75 only work in the few remaining non-rhotic dialects, the 4th relies on counting the phoneme /t͡s/ as 2 consonants, and all have a morpheme boundary through the cluster, except the last, which has two.) His discussion of ζ is much, much shorter than in this article, and incomparably much more simple-minded. He claims in all seriousness *headdesk* that the circumflex was always purely etymological, not knowing that there are several Ancient Greek texts in which the authors make fun of overenthusiastic rhetors who end up pronouncing one word instead of another by getting the accent wrong! In the same place, he claims that a rising-and-falling tone on a single syllable is "an impossibility in actual speech", not knowing that several languages (let's try the Kam language) have just such a thing as a phonemic tone, and that others (like Mandarin) have a falling-and-rising phonemic tone. (I'm not saying that the circumflex was ever pronounced that way. I'm just saying that Caragounis' argument is completely ignorant.) It doesn't occur to him that the Hebrew waw (even though that's what he calls it!) was ever pronounced [w]. In endnote 70, he wants to have -νδρ- pronounced [nðr], a particularly stupid hypercorrectivism of Katharévusa that has, I bet, never existed in less artificial varieties of Greek (even Spanish doesn't do such nonsense).
Given all this, it's a bit bizarre that he uses full polytonic spelling for Modern Greek... in 1995.
Speaking of spelling: when he talks about the history of the Greek alphabet, it's practically all about Athens, Athens, Athens. When he cites inscriptions, he practically never mentions where they're from, leaving all that to his sources.
The winning quote (p. 179, or 19 of the pdf): "No unexpressed sound can have objective existence in a language!" The context makes obvious that "unexpressed" means "unexpressed in writing". The statement, thus, is of such unbelievable stupidity that I don't even need to explain why.
In some cases, Wikipedia knows more about Modern Greek dialects than he does, and again it shows – painfully. In Tsakonian, ω has merged into ου, not into ο. In Pontic, IIRC, η has merged into ε, not into ι. In a whole bunch of central dialects, including Tsakonian, υ has merged into ου, not into ι, except that it remains distinct from both behind consonants that can be palatalized (so that λυ has turned into [lʲu], neither [lu] nor [lʲi]).
He pays extremely little attention to the dialect diversity of Ancient Greek, too. Oh, in endnote 111 he manages to mention their existence.
There are several examples of the all-or-nothing fallacy (if comparative linguistics or Latin transcriptions or whatever aren't absolutely 100 % reliable, they are utterly useless and must be completely ignored). Sure, sheep don't make [vi], but because descriptions of animal sounds are never completely accurate, he simply declares βῆ βῆ irrelevant! What is he, Borg? (Hint: where I come from, sheep are claimed to make mäh, because m is voiced while b is not in Upper German dialects except those southernmost ones with heavy Slovene influence.)
(One of the German examples is misspelled, with c instead of z, though not in a way that changes the pronunciation. In a German quote in an endnote, he leaves a grammatical ending off that is not silent but is clear from context. And a third quote strikes me as self-ironic, but he reads it straight and is outraged.)
He quotes "Allen's Vox Graeca" on Allen's own difficulties in distinguishing the aspirated from the unaspirated voiceless plosives in hearing and speaking, and tries to make some major point of it. Come on. What's going on here is that English lacks such a distinction, having just one series of weakly aspirated plosives instead. Learn Hindi or Thai or, probably best, Icelandic and then come back!
On p. 185 (24/25 of the pdf), he makes a complete U-turn, abandons all his arguments about ancient texts, and claims we can't know anything at all ever and therefore have to resort to the Modern Greek pronunciation. ...like... seriously? Classical Latin, let alone Old Latin, isn't Standard Italian ( = 14th century Tuscan), let alone modern Tuscan, either. (Incidentally, modern Tuscan famously has [ɸ θ x].)
In endnote 32 he talks about "a thicker, rougher b-sound". Dude, learn some phonetics and then come back, because then we might understand you.
Endnote 98: "Is it really credible that Greeks would have sounded all their circumflexed words as words expressing astonishment?" That's exactly how phonemic tone works. Learn Mandarin.
Endnote 108, finally, completely confuses spellings and sounds, and further confuses one Greek, French and Italian phoneme with two English, German and Dutch ones.
Outside of theology (I guess), he's just another half-educated crackpot with delusions of knowledge and understanding. He should be pitied, not cited as a source; and from how he cites Jannaris, Jannaris should be treated the same way! I'm not removing the citation, because I don't know if there's anybody left who makes defensible arguments that would support any of his claims. But I... strongly doubt there's anyone. Someone please look for one.
David Marjanović (talk) 00:38, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  I just finished reading Caragounis (1995) 

message: This is a general comment for all regular editors of this article: please go back and add references. Lots of them. It is astounding how much information the reader is expected to take at face value. I am especially surprised because this is a very technical article, and I suspect many of its contributors are academicians who really ought to know better! 108.175.230.39 (talk) 03:00, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: I've been keeping a list of minimal pairs and triads for use in this article. I'll update this from time to time.
*  "say!, experience, depth"
*  "whence, when, this"
*  "he spoke, words, he stepped"
*  "country, girl, assembly"
*  "utterance, all (masculine dative plural), step"
*  "putting, stretching, hairy"
*  "I slay, I stretch, terribly"
— Eru·tuon 22:22, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minimal pairs 

message: Here is a reliable source for the data:
Gimson, A. C. An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. Chapter 11 (pp. 283-292). Edward Arnold Ltd.: London, 1986 (ELBS edition of third edition 1980, reprinted). .  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.131.70.134 (talk) 13:22, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you! I'll add that to the article when I have some time. — Eru·tuon 18:45, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stops: English (second paragraph) 

message: It's stated here that Greek epsilon has the phonetic value of [e] and that Greek eta has the phonetic value of [ε]. However, in every source on Greek phonology I've read (Vox Graeca and a variety of standard texts), it has been stated that epsilon has the value of [ε] and eta has the value of [e]. Why does it state otherwise in this article? Are my sources outdated or incorrect? --Joseph Yanchar (User page/Talk page) 22:17, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I rewrote the article based on Vox Graeca, and I'm pretty sure Allen says epsilon is pronounced as mid  and eta as open-mid . I don't have Allen with me, so I can't quote the passages, but if you look at the inline citations in the article, you can find the pages that I read. — Eru·tuon 01:59, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, it's definitely consensus in scholarship that "η" was half-open /ɛ:/, as it stood in phonemic contrast with a second, closer /e:/ sound, spelled "ει". The exact phonetic value of short "ε" is more difficult to ascertain, as there was no other short vowel in that area to contrast with, so it could essentially have been anywhere along the [ɛ–e] range. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:26, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  ε=[e] and η=[ε]? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article deserves a green star.--Manfariel (talk) 17:37, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: That's very gratifying. — Eru·tuon 09:07, 5 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: prize

message: The voiceless l (/l̥/) is put in the consonant chart, but it's never referred to again.  Can someone knowledgeable on the topic explain when this sound occurs, how it's spelled, etc.?
2600:1700:EE00:DF30:2C1A:382E:67DC:3BDC (talk) 03:20, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: There is an example of voiceless l in the Debuccalization section. That section should probably be linked from the Liquids section. — Eru·tuon 11:41, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  /l̥/ 

message: Why does IPA have the accent on the first vowel in
τοιαῦται /toi.áu.tai/ but on the second vowel in
βουλεύσειε /buː.leú.sei.e/? (By spelling rules the written accent has to be on the υ, so that's no help.) What's the rule? Aren't they both offglides? --213.138.251.225 (talk) 10:02, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: See the Accent section. There are two ways of transcribing the accent contrast between acute and circumflex on a long vowel: 1. circumflex  (high pitch on first mora), acute  (high pitch on second mora); 2. circumflex  (falling pitch), acute  (rising pitch). The first way is the one that is used in the examples that you quote. — Eru·tuon 11:48, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Accent within diphthongs

message: If someone didn't, I suggest to read the above review by David Marjanović. Not a surprise, Caragounis is famous for his flawed article. It's useless, if not detrimental, why is it still listed in bibliography after 9 years (and more, discussion goes on almost from 2005)? Its presence does anything but lower the reliability of the page. Ptolemaios (talk) 14:42, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Caragounis' article