Talk:Ancient Greek phonology

Editors who are interested in improving this article are encouraged to read this talk page discussion and the previous discussion at the Archive 1 and Archive 2.

articles that we need to check

Please use this section only for things that we need to look up, that might be relevant to this article +MATIA ☎ 20:34, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

• George Babiniotis, The question of mediae in Ancient Macedonian Greek reconsidered (this study is also at ISBN 1556191448).
• A History of Ancient Greek - From the Beginnings to Late Antiquity. Edited and translated by A.-F. Christidis, University of Thessaloniki, Greece http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521833078 Biography: http://www.greeklanguage.gr/christidis/pubs.htm
• N. Andriotis, Greek Language History: Four essays, reprint, 1995, pp. 168 (€ 6). ISBN 960-231-058-8.
• Ανδριώτης Ν., Ιστορική γραμματική της αρχαίας ελληνικής. Μέρος Α': Φωνητική (πανεπιστημιακές παραδόσεις), Θεσσαλονίκη 1969
• Συμεωνίδης Χ., Ιστορική γραμματική της αρχαίας Ελληνικής. Μέρος Α': Φωνητική (πανεπιστημιακές παραδόσεις), Εκδοτικός Οίκος Αφών Κυριακίδη, Θεσσαλονίκη 1989.
• E. H. Sturtevant, The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Philadelphia 1940.
• F. T. Gignac, A grammar of the Greek papyri of the Roman and Byzantine periods. Vol. 1: phonology. Milan 1976.
• L. Threatte, The grammar of Attic inscriptions, Vol. 1. Berlin 1980.
• Sven Tage Teodorsson:
  • "The phonemic system of the Attic dialect 400-340 BC" (Göteborg, 1974);
  • "The phonology of Ptolemaic Koine" (Göteborg, 1977); and
  • "The phonology of Attic in the Hellenistic period" (Göteborg 1978).

• Geoffrey Horrocks: "Greek: a history of the language and its speakers" (London, 1997); or
• Randall Buth: Η κοινή προφορά: "Notes on the Pronunciation System of Phonemic Koine Greek"

Summary of previous discussions

One editor, User:Thrax wants to include in this article the hypothesis that the pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very similar to that of Modern Greek, whereas all other editors have the opinion that this is a marginal view and should only be mentioned in one sentence. Andreas 03:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Thrax' comment on this summary has been moved to Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Thrax's responses to RFC comments, please see section "Block warning" below. Bishonen | talk 11:32, 26 December 2005 (UTC).

Responses to RFC

This area is for editors who have not participated in the discussion until now. Please put your responses here. Please, do not edit the individual responses, but put your comments at the end of the section. Limit your comments to a few sentences.

Try not to be confrontational. Be friendly and keep calm.

Mediate where possible - identify common ground, attempt to draw editors together rather than push them apart.

If necessary, educate users by referring to the appropriate Wikipedia policies.

Thank you. Andreas 03:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Being an expert of the Ancient Greek language, I can assure the readers that the reconstructed pronunciation is indeed 100% valid, and it is found in all respectable handbooks, also in the most recent ones. Even if the pronunciation of the "dasea" as fricatives may have been anticipated in certain dialects and in certain registers in the Classical period already, nothing suggests that it was adopted universally until the Roman period. --Enkyklios 16:40, 22 December 2005 (CET)

The following discussion between Enkyklios and Thrax has been moved to Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Thrax's responses to RFC comments, please see section "Block warning" below. Bishonen | talk 11:32, 26 December 2005 (UTC).

Anti-bloat measures

It seems Thrax can't be stopped from bloating talk pages with rambling, repetitive confrontational stuff. Maybe it's just as well for the moment, for anybody who comes in on the RfC to see immediately what's going on. But in the future I propose we should find a way of keeping talk pages reasonably clean.

Thrax, please, put your argumentation somewhere, in one place together, once. I suggest you make it a sub-page of your own talk page. Then, whenever you feel you have to remind us of some argument of yours, just link to it with one short remark here.

Else, I might adopt a policy of deleting anything you write even on the talk page if it exceeds some reasonable limit (i.e. moving it to an archive of its own, or to your talk page, and replacing it with only a link.)

I know, you're going to shout censorship now, but there's no point repeating yourself over and over again here, and you may have noticed that people have by now stopped replying to you. Lukas 08:31, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Deleting a contributor on the talkpage is a rather extreme measure, but seeing what Thrax just did to the new sections "Summary of previous discussions" (which went from two-and-a-half lines on my screen, to 15, and is no longer a summary) and "Responses to RFC", a section specially provided for outside comment, I agree with Lucas. Thrax, nobody wants to stop you from responding to comments, even in those sections, but please do it in the way Lucas requests, or he will IMO be justified in removing your comments to a more convenient place and linking to them. Incidentally, writing in ALL CAPS is seen as shouting. Please don't greet people who are here to help (specifically at your own invitation, on the RFC page), with a shout of "WRONG!" It's just counterproductive. Please be friendly, calm, and welcoming. Bishonen | talk 10:43, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Words unchanged in pronunciation and meaning in 35 centuries.

Putting aside the preposterous claims of Thrax, it recently occurred to me that the word μέλι(=honey) is attested in Linear B myceanean. I find it amazing that this word has probably remained totally unchanged in both pronunciation and meaning in 35 centuries! So Agamemnon would have pronounced it the same way as any speaker of Greek alive today. It would be fun to find other words like that one but I cannot think of any.Yannos 23:21, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Block warning

Unfortunately, I see that Thrax has ignored Lukas' and my pleas above ("Anti-bloat measures") for keeping this page managable, civil, and useful, and has continued to try to shout down all opposition and add long posts to the wrong section. I'm sorry it had to come to this, but I've moved the long argument between Thrax and Enkyklios to Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Thrax's responses to RFC comments. I don't mean to marginalize Thrax or make it difficult for him to take part in the discussion, but I don't see any other alternative to the (still less desirable) option of premature archiving of this whole page, outside responses and all. Thrax, please put any further responses you wish to make to Enkyklios or anybody else who responds to the RFC at Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Thrax's responses to RFC comments. Feel free to post a brief note in "Responses to RFC" that you have done so, and a diff pointing to your post, but don't argue in that section any more. This is not optional, since you have been making this talkpage unusable. Stop shouting and personally attacking other contributors. You are currently violating WP:CIVIL and disrupting this page. Desist or I will block you.Bishonen | talk 11:37, 26 December 2005 (UTC).

This is deliberate censorship and the tactics of dishonest charlatans who know that their lies and falsifications cannot stand up to the evidence against them so they are now trying to prevent people form reading the evidence at all. The reconstructed pronunciation of ancient Greek is an unscientific theory based on the false notion of Germanic supremacy and everyone who has read the evidence against it and the racist slurs made by its advocates against the Greeks, and every expert in Semitic linguistics, knows it is an untenable 19th century academic fraud. --Thrax 18:45, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

The proof of this deliberate censorship and dishonest tactics is shown by Macrakis recent attempt to delete my above contribution from this page. Macrakis wants to conceal the fact that modern linguistics does not support the reconstructed pronunciation as a scientific theory but only acknowledges it as an Erasmian based convention used in teaching in English speaking countries. Modern linguists are all unanimous in the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the reconstructed pronunciation and Semitic linguists support that ancient Greek was pronounced exactly like modern Greek. --Thrax 20:46, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Crossposted to User talk:Thrax:

You have been blocked for 24 hours for personal attacks and disruption. Please note that if you continue the same actions after the block expires, I will block you for longer. Many people have recommended WP:NPOV and WP:CITE to your attention. I hope you will click on those links and spend some of the next 24 hours studying them, as well as WP:NPA and WP:CIVIL. Bishonen | talk 23:02, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Blocking people in order to gain advantage in a content war is against the rules. --Vregamoto 01:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

The evidence against the reconstructed pronunciation

These accounts need to be included in the main article.

• Chrys C. Caragounis (1995): "The error of Erasmus and un-greek pronunciations of Greek". Filologia Neotestamentaria 8 (16)
• Chrys C. Caragounis (2004): Development of Greek and the New Testament, Mohr Siebeck
• Th. Papadimitrakopoulos (1889): Βάσανος τῶν περὶ τῆς ἑλληνικῆς προφορᾶς Ἐρασμικῶν ἀποδείξεων. Athens.
• Dionysios Thrax description of the sounds of the mediae (100 BC) which implies that they cannot have been anything but fricatives.
• Semitic Linguisitic theory which implies that all proto-Sinaitic based alphabets including Phoenicians, Hebrew and Greek contained letters which were allophones for proto-Semitic fricatives and plosives.
• Semitic Linguisitic theory which states that the original Hebrew non-fricative mediae and dasea became fricatives before 280 BC and that the original Hebrew fricative mediae and dasea became breaths by 280 BC, thus proto-Semitic fricative "g" stopped being represented in the written language by 280 BC but was still recognisable as modern Greek gamma in the spoken language and represented as fricative gamma in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew bible made in 280 BC and later became a breath in the spoken langauge. --Thrax 21:06, 26 December 2005 (UTC)