From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 25 1999 - 11:17:52 EST
At 11:49 PM -0500 12/24/99, BGREEKNW@cs.com wrote:
>I am just starting to learn Greek so please be patient in the coming weeks
>regarding my elementary level questions. Does the process of contraction
>happen only for euphonic purposes? Does that change only happen when one
>speaks the language or when it is initially being written? or both?
>
>
> Nicholas Wynder
I LIKE your e-handle! Welcome to B-Greek, NW! We try to deal with questions
about Greek at just about any level--we've taken quite a few, it seems to
me, even about the alphabet over the years.
Supplementing the response already given by Carlton Winbery:
I guess you could call it euphonic considerations that explain contraction.
But it is a rather complex phenomenon that doesn't operate the same way in
all dialects, and I think it is Attic practice that has most influenced the
way words continue to be pronounced and spelled in Koine. The major factors
in bringing about contractions are
(1) the evanescence of very weakly-pronounced older consonants, in
particular Digamma (written, when it's written, with an "F" because it
actually became "F" from the western Greek into the Roman alphabet) with
its "w" sound, Iota consonant (written either as a "y" or more often like
the vocalic Iota with a tiny concave semi-circle touching the bend at the
bottom of the iota) with its "y" sound, and Sigma when it appeared between
vowels; and
(2) the Athenian distaste for hiatus left between adjacent vowels after the
evanescence of one of those weak consonants. This distaste shows itself
even in the fusion of adjacent vowels at the end of one word and beginning
of the next in such forms as hWNHR for hO ANHR or K)/AN for KAI )E/AN.
My own experience in teaching and learning is that it's easier to learn the
basic contraction rules than it is to memorize paradigms of contract verbs
and contract nouns and adjectives, and also the principles that (generally)
O vowels prevail over both A and E vowels, and A vowels prevail over E
vowels; another thing worth knowing is that a long-A resulting from
contraction (as of E-A) normally shifts further into H except after
preceding E, I, or Rho.
Perhaps worth knowing also is that contraction is not universal; Ionic
dialect seems to have a great toleration for hiatus between vowels; for
instance, Attic SAUTON (acc.2 sg. reflexive pronoun) deriving from older
SEAUTON is regularly found in Ionic as SEWUTON; in poetry, especially
Homer, we can find contracted vowels occasionally re-opened in a process
called "diectasis": e.g. hORWSI from hORAOUSI will appear in Homeric verse
not infrequently as hORO-WSI.
So I guess "euphony" is the right word for the factor underlying these
changes, but there are variations from one dialect of Greek to another in
aesthetic feelings about contiguous vowels, and one factor that makes
learning Koine or Attic Greek a little bit harder to learn than it might be
is the Attic intolerance of vowel hiatus. One work-around for this adopted
by a professor at the University of Texas (I don't know if they still use
that textbook) was to learn Ionic dialect the first semester (reading
Herodotus in Ionic) and then make the switch-over to Attic and learning the
contractions the second semester.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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