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Notes for Classicists
When I first began developing my style of reciting Greek, in the mid-seventies,
the main authority on the sound of spoken Greek was Allen's Vox Graeca.
Now we have Devine and Stephens, whose impressive Prosody of Greek Speech
has made me reconsider many things, though not as yet to significantly alter
my practice. I will list here the main ways in which that practice differs
from what others have done or recommended, and briefly discuss my approach
to some of the points in question.
1. General philosophy: There are people who can acquire perfect pronunciation
in languages not their own, but not in the absence of living models. Short
of the discovery of ancient voice recordings, our pronunciation of ancient
Greek is going to remain “foreign” no matter what we do. What, then,
should be our criteria for a “good” pronunciation? Think of foreign accents
in English: one kind does not prevent a foreign actor from speaking clearly,
eloquently, and with good rhythm; another reduces the simplest greeting to
impenetrable babble. Throughout my practice I have assumed that clarity, good
rhythm, and an intonation that is expressive without emphasizing the wrong
syllables, are far more important than the exact shade of each vowel and
consonant. To be sure, these things interact - everything in a pronunciation,
more or less, interacts with everything else. Individual phonemes must obviously
be such as to yield the correct quantities. They should also, so far as possible,
be clearly and consistently distinguishable. But this still leaves a lot of
leeway. In any widely spoken language, after all, there is tremendous variety
even in native pronunciations.
But how does one really judge rhythm? A line of poetry, as regrettable numbers
of students can attest, does not necessarily feel rhythmic just because it
is correctly scanned. Are there objective standards for what is expressive?
Can we measure eloquence?
Reciters will inevitably be guided by their own feelings of rightness, subjective
to a degree of course, but by no means entirely so. The voice, after all,
is a physical thing, and quickly gives its own measure of what is workable
and what is not. If certain articulations, certain vocal habits, seem to dramatically
increase fluency, stamina, ability to memorize, maintain rhythm, and vary
expression, while others just as clearly do the opposite, the reciter can
hardly be faulted for trying to cultivate the former and shed the latter,
no matter what the historical evidence says.
None of which guarantees that every listener will find the result either
eloquent, expressive, or rhythmic. Those who don’t are free to develop their
own styles. One thing we should not try to do, given both the scale
of our ignorance and the nature of the art, is confine the “good” to a single,
approved type.
2. Pitch excursions: I make no attempt to confine accentual rises
in pitch to any particular interval. The statement of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
that appears to specify the interval of a fifth (De Compositione Verborum,
xi) has caused a lot of trouble, in my opinion, and is partly to blame for
the sing-song quality of many "reconstructed" pronunciations. Allen's interpretation
of the passage as referring to a sort of mean or average (VG, p. 120)
seems plausible to me, and Devine and Stephens I think largely concur (PGS,
pp. 171-172).
There are deeper reasons, though, behind the tendency to "sing" the accents.
Most of us are not very aware of how we are using pitch in our everyday speech.
The fact that stress accent in English, despite its demonstrably greater reliance
on pitch, is still usually thought of in terms of loudness, clearly shows
this. By and large, we are aware of the pitch element only when some recognizably
"musical" interval is used - one belonging to the diatonic scale, and usually
a “harmonic” one: a third, fourth, fifth, sixth or octave. A rise in pitch
by any other interval tends to be heard as an increase in volume. When applied
to Greek, such rises can sound like inappropriate "stresses" of the kind
that we are told we must avoid to produce an "authentic" pitch accent.
In my own practice I use these "non-musical" or “stress-like” intervals
as freely as any others to render the accents. Roughly speaking, I require
only that an accented syllable represent some kind of perceptible local peak
in intonation, which may be very slight, very pronounced, or anywhere inbetween.
The actual interval chosen for each accentual rise and/or postaccentual fall
will depend on the needs of expression and emphasis and the general intonational
curve of the phrase in which it occurs. I find that by this method I can read
any Greek verse passage in strict meter, with just about any expression or
emphasis I choose.
Naturally, the speech melodies that emerge from such an approach, though
different from those of one's native speech, are still going to be conditioned
by them, or by other languages one has actually heard, and are not likely
to match the ancient speech melody. This, I would say, is of minor importance.
That melody will not be heard again. What we can, and should try to do, is
use speech melodies that seem expressive to us, and at the same time violate
nothing we know with any degree of certainty about the rules of accent and
quantity.
On the matter of intonation over phrases and sentences Devine and Stephens
have a great deal to say. For one thing, they give cogent arguments for a
general fall in pitch over the course of a sentence (PGS, pp. 435-441).
This accords pretty well with my own practice, and is also a feature mostly
ignored by reconstructions of the more sing-song variety.
2. Acute vs circumflex: I interpret the circumflex as an acute on
the first half of a long syllable followed by a fall in pitch on the second
half. An acute-accented long syllable I interpret as the same, minus the fall
on the second half. On this interpretation it is admittedly difficult, in
certain positions, to consistently distinguish the two, and I don't claim
that I always manage to do so. This doesn’t particularly trouble me. The difference
must have been small, though perceptible, as the story of the actor Hegelochus
shows. There are of course other views of how these accents differed in contour;
all I can say is that doing it this way feels comfortable to me; there are
probably other ways of doing it convincingly, but I don’t know that the overall
effect, because of that alone, would be dramatically different.
3. Grave accents: When I first began reciting I consistently treated
grave-accented syllables as unaccented. Devine and Stephens have argued, mostly
from the evidence of musical settings (PGS, pp. 180-183), that the
grave represents a lowered, not a totally suppressed, acute. It is
fair to say that my treatment of the grave is at present somewhat equivocal.
Since it is put where it is by orthographic rule, it seems at least possible
that it doesn’t represent anything very consistent as regards intonation.
There are times when I feel a grave-accented syllable can take a full, acute-sized
rise in pitch; this would be mostly when I wanted to emphasize the word in
performance, or to put a slight pause after it. At other times I pronounce
the syllable with a slight rise, at still others, with none at all. Considering
that my intonation of unaccented syllables is also pretty free, it would be
hard for me to give definite rules for how I treat the grave.
4. Vowels and diphthongs: In general I follow the pronunciations
recommended by Allen in VG, except for the pronunciation of epsilon
+ iota, which, after trying for awhile to pronounce as a mid-close long vowel
as he recommends (VG, pp. 69-75), I am now gravitating back to pronouncing
as a true diphthong. Not because I think that is more correct: I simply prefer
it. The important thing, it seems to me, is that this sound, whether diphthongized
or not, be clearly differentiated from the more open sound of eta.
Diphthongs traditionally written with iota subscript I consistently pronounce
as such.
5. Consonants: Again I follow Allen, but in the pronunciation of
theta, phi, and chi, I compromise: for two of them I use what I would think
of as a transitional pronunciation between the original aspirated consonants
and the fricatives they evolved into: theta I pronounce roughly halfway between
English t and th, while phi I make roughly like f
or pf, but placing the upper and lower lips together (i.e. a bilabial
fricative) rather than placing the lower lip against the upper teeth. Chi
I pronounce as a fricative, more or less like German ch.
6. Fluency and speed: I have tried to approximate a plausibly “normal”
rate of delivery, and to make the language flow like normal speech. Probably
the biggest factor here, after becoming comfortable with the pitch accent,
is to have internalized a pronunciation of long and short vowels, single and
double consonants, and consonant combinations that will automatically yield
the correct quantities. One cannot recite properly when one is worried about
scansion. Any real sense of rhythm - especially in elaborate meters like
those of choral lyric - tends to break down or slip away in a pokey, hesitant
delivery. Scansion of course is still indispensable, if only for recognizing
metrical shortening and lengthening and clarifying doubtful quantities.
Inadequate internalization also makes it impossible to confidently slow
or speed the rate of delivery for expressive purposes, or simply for variety,
or to pause appropriately (more on this in the introduction to the Homer readings),
without fear of losing the rhythm.
7. Ictus: As indicated above, one feature of my pronunciation that
is liable to seem “wrong” to some is my use of pitch intervals that “stress”
the accents, a thing many say must not be done in Greek. The reason usually
given is that this somehow disrupts or supplants the true ictus of the verse.
To me this seems, most probably, the result of a massive confusion, partly
semantic, partly conceptual, and partly perceptual. Ictus is not stress, though
in English and other stress-accented languages stress is what produces ictus
when ictus is present. In Greek, as we know, or should know, this is not
the case: ictus arises from a repeated pattern of quantities, or not at all.
No mere accent, however prominent, can shift it from its true position, provided
the correct quantities are being observed.
A stress accent need not even carry higher pitch, but in English it mostly
does, and in the kind of stress accent Greek eventually acquired, stresses
have replaced the original rises in pitch on the same syllables. Or to put
it differently, the accents have largely kept their pitch, but also acquired
duration. Whatever ictus modern Greek verse has doubtless comes, as in English,
from the accents. This would, indeed, seem to argue for some original tension,
not yet amounting to conflict, between accent and quantity, which later helped
erode the unaccented long syllables and tip things towards a stress accent.
To my ears it is this tension that gives real life to the rhythm. The syncopated
sound of short accented syllable followed by unaccented long, the very distinct
sounds of spondees depending on which syllable is accented, the constant divergence
and falling back in line of accent and ictus, these things, far from obscuring
the rhythm, give it far greater definition and memorability, making it easier
to internalize, to the point where one can be confidently free with it.
Carefully confining pitch rises to “musical” intervals, and trying to avoid
any sense of “stress” on the accents, to my mind deflates this tension and
results in a much deader rhythm, which decreases fluency and makes the verse
much harder to memorize. Without tension, rhythm becomes mere empty pattern,
like a dripping faucet.
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