Ancient Greek thought on prosody: through time and Latin eyes

Latin authors writing about the Latin word accent often sound like Greek authors writing about the Greek accent. For example, Latin authors tell us that a Latin accented syllable has a 'circumflex' if it is the next-to-last syllable in the word and has a long vowel, provided that the vowel of the last syllable is short. Exactly the same happens to be true in Greek.

Modern scholars either (i) comment that Latin grammarians 'ape' Greek grammarians on accentological matters, as if they fail to notice that Latin and Greek are different languages, or (ii) argue that Latin really had an accent remarkably similar to that of Greek, with acutes and circumflexes and remarkably Greek-like rules for their distribution.

But both views miss an important point. By the time our Latin grammarians are writing, the distinction between acute and circumflex accent is very unlikely to have been audible in Greek. Thus if we suspect the claim that certain Latin words had a circumflex of being nonsensical, it is hardly more so than the claim that certain Greek words had a circumflex in any audible sense, at least at the time when the Latin grammarians encountered this claim.

Moreover, long after the circumflex and acute accents had ceased to sound different from each other in Greek, Greek grammarians continued to make use of this distinction in their descriptions of the language. The same is true for the distinction between long and short vowels, among other concepts. Rather than being merely relics of the past, these features had acquired a different status in Greek grammatical thought. They had become abstract features--in other words technical devices that helped in the overall description of the language. For example, the concept that some vowels were theoretically long while some were theoretically short made it feasible to continue describing the possible positions for the Greek accent very succinctly (the accent may fall on any of the last three syllables, unless the last contains a 'long vowel').

In this light, when Latin grammarians take over from Greek grammarians a concept such as the distinction between acute and circumflex, they are taking the concept directly into an abstract level of their own descriptive system. For Latin the concept is of little practical use as a technical device, but its abstract nature makes it easy to take over without any consequences for actual pronunciation. Conversely, when Latin grammarians make statements about matters whose Greek counterparts would have been perfectly audible (for example the actual syllable on which the accent falls), these should be taken seriously as statements about the sound of Latin.

An example here is the Latin grammarians' doctrine that the enclitics -que, -ve, -ne and -ce cause the accent to go on the preceding syllable, regardless of the weight of that syllable. Modern scholars have frequently doubted that this can always be true, and have suspected undue influence from Greek grammarians writing about similar sequences in Greek. But statements about which syllable is accented are not interpretable as belonging only to an abstract level: they should be taken seriously as statements about the sound of Latin.

The proposed project will gather and present evidence for abstract thinking in the Greek grammatical tradition on accentuation and vowel lengths (both coming under the ancient discipline of 'Prosody'), and will develop the hypothesis that abstract features of Greek grammatical description--including some that became abstract as the language changed--were taken over into Latin grammatical thinking as abstract features.

The project aims to encourage more work on similar questions in other grammatical traditions of the world. Furthermore, it aims to enrich language teaching and learning in schools by drawing attention to historical and modern techniques for describing one language in categories imported from another, thus making a foreign language less alien.

I am often asked how we know how ancient languages were pronounced. The question interests a very broad range of people, including those learning an ancient language (who want to know, in addition, how the specific language they are learning was actually pronounced) and many who simply find the question intrinsically interesting. Related topics that capture the imagination include how languages have been taught over the centuries, and how the teaching of one language can affect the teaching of another. Famously, the teaching of Latin grammar has influenced the teaching of English, and indeed English usage itself, on many points including the idea that split infinitives are inelegant and the idea that sentences should not end with a preposition. These are the contexts in which I envisage the research appealing widely outside academia.

In particular, the research will interest the following groups outside academia:

(1) School teachers and pupils interested in the pronunciation of ancient Greek and Latin, and in how we know about these things. In order to reach this audience I plan to offer an article to Omnibus, the magazine for students of the Classical world published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT), and a seminar at the JACT Greek Summer School in Dorset.

(2) Teachers and pupils at schools that do not necessarily teach Latin or ancient Greek, or have recently begun to do so (often with the help of Classics for All: http://www.classicsforall.org.uk). The National Curriculum now includes a compulsory ancient or modern language component at primary school level, and the DfE Key Stage Four Latin Initiative is prompting secondary school teachers of modern languages to take up the teaching of Latin. We are therefore at a point when enrichment activity stands to make a real difference to the success of new language teaching and learning initiatives at schools, and to teachers taking up a new language in order to make it available to the next generation. I would therefore like to expand my outreach activities by actively offering enrichment talks to teachers and pupils at schools that would particularly benefit, on topics connected to the teaching of languages over the centuries, and how the teaching of one language can interact with the teaching of another. When one language is described in terms of categories borrowed from another, as when early modern grammars of English give English a Latin-style system of grammatical genders and cases, the result is often dismissed as artificial nonsense; yet such descriptions can serve a useful purpose in making a foreign language (in this case Latin) less alien. More generally, by drawing attention to historical and modern language teaching and learning techniques (regardless of whether we like or adopt them) I hope to enrich the intrinsic interest of language teaching and learning itself. As part of these events I would include structured discussion to encourage teachers and pupils to reflect explicitly on their own strategies for language teaching and learning.

(3) Members of the general public. I frequently talk to groups of interested members of the public, and plan to continue these activities. Possible topics connected to the project again include language teaching and learning through the centuries, the influence of one tradition on another, and a talk in praise of the traditional grammarian. Traditional grammarians tend to receive a bad press as pedants out of touch with everyday language use, and this often prevents us giving them a second thought. Yet when we really understand them in the context of their own times and experiences of language, they do not always turn out to be so out of touch, and they can teach us a tremendous amount about their languages.