Language Learners' Library

I remember reading that and it made quite an impression on me that Lucian must have had quite the sense of humor, since immediately after someone reads the title of the book, the book itself begins with a disclaimer by the author that the tales are by no means true.
Lucian could have been a modern clickbait (web)master, easily :innocent:

I am very tempted to write here some of my favorite scenes/ideas presented by Lucian in Timon. I still find it amazing and inspiring, in the way that it makes very clear that human behaviours, unlike technology, have not changed much during 2 thousand years and that some basic underlying issues and thought patterns have been with us ever since the dawn of recorded society.

I do not know why exactly, but I find it inspiring that a lot of the problems we are facing, the ancients faced as well. I guess it alleviates a lot of the pressure of solving them, if nothing else :stuck_out_tongue:

If you’re interested, they also supplied audio of the “original Greek”, as they consider it:

I got curious and went to listen to one. It is very interesting that more so than the accent and the sometimes totally different pronounciation, what makes some of the words totally unintelligible to me is the unnatural cadence of speech they are using, as if they are being read by some automated bot, like the ones streamers have today. Wasn’t Electra a theatric tragedy/play? They are hitting some of these words as hard as metal drums. Pronounciation aside, words and sentences have to have some natural “flow” in them in order to be understood :upside_down_face:

Which gave me an idea (also @Sanonius ) that you might find interesting, since you are actual scholars of the matter. Have you thought of determining the length of vowels and how words were pronounced by using the transcripts of byzantine music?

Sure, I hear the argument that even today words in music are altered in order to fit a rhythm and are not always pronounced correctly in order to fit a tune, but that is true for western music, which we all know and are used to. However, Byzantine music doesn’t really work the same way and each note in the fast hymns (called Ειρμολογικα) represents a syllable. If some assortments of letters like οι, αι, ει, where to be pronounced in a totally distinct way, then, chances are, the byzantine hymn orthography (there is actually such a thing, with complex rules) would have assigned them a note of their own, more often than not.

They also have their own way of having rhythm/meters which is not determined by strict music theory, but by the cadence and the amounts of syllables of the words themselves. In western music, if you have a 4/4 meter (as far as I know), you are forced to change the cadence of the words to fit the meter. However, in Byzantine music, you change the meter to match the cadence and the intonation of the words.

Granted, those hymns obviously do not go in the Before Christ era of ancient Greek, but some of them are as old as 200 - 300 A.D. … For example the hymn to Mary, “Τη υπερμάχω στρατηγώ” is said to be written around 626 A.D. … not exactly “ancient”, but I’d take 1400 years ago as “good enough to be worth the effort”.

Here is how that sounds though it is not a slow Ειρμολογικο. That is a slower piece ( called Στιχηραρικό ) where each syllable can have a lot of notes assigned to them:

You can hear there that they pronounce the οι in the word παντοίων as a very fast οι sound and they do not assign many notes to it, despite being a slower hymn. That, to me, sounds like a more plausible pronounciation of the time, which might explain why the hard distinct ο-ι sound with which people pronounce the word “koine” today according to the Erasmian pronounciation. Also, it just downed to me that if you were to pronounce the hard distinct ο-ι, then the word breaks in syllables thusly : κο-ι-νή, ko-i-ne, while in the hymns where syllables are all important (and are the closest music we have today, derived by the ancient Greek scales), it is always one syllable, as it is today κοι-νή, koi-ne.

If it was a fast οι sound, instead of a hard distinct ο-ι, then this might also explain why it went away and it was eventually incorporated with the other ει, ι , η sounds. :slight_smile:

Closer to my earlier point though, this is a simple hymn, one of the most basic and most ancient, and it is fast with each syllable having its own note:

As you may notice the hymn does not consider as two distinct the “ει” in “εισάκουσον” .

I have no clue if other people have studied this idea/approach, but it seems very interesting to me :slight_smile:

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