It is certainly the most world's read "Latin" - but yes it's in fact a bit of Cicero's philosophy that has been hacked to pieces and stitched together by an unknown typographer in Swinging Sixties London. A strange story!
Get W. Sidney Allen's slim text _Vox Graeca_. It goes over not only how Ancient Greek was pronounced but also how we know. The evidence includes explicit notes from grammarians and other writers, graffiti, borrowings, puns, and later forms of Greek. Allen also has another book _Vox Latina_ which does the same thing for Latin.
But I didn't ask about how we know the pronunciation. I asked about how we know how to say hello. There are any number of good reasons the word for olive oil might be attested in Greek. It's not so obvious why "hello" would be attested -- it's usually something you say, not something you write down.
This one seems tricky. English letters do not normally begin with "hello", or even with any synonymous phrase. Instead, they use forms that are specific to written letters.
A good question. The best, i.e. least likely to be unreliable, sources are: epistles as preserved by papyri; conversations as preserved in ancient drama (especially comedy); phrase-books that survive from ancient school curricula; funerary inscriptions that use everyday language; graffiti.
Many thanks for this. Yes, a fuller article would make mention of 'crasis' - where two successive words are melded into one utterance - which inevitably affected pitch and accentuation. As to breathings, their affect on pitch (as opposed to pronunciation) was null: the rough was a mere aspirate, and the 'smooth' was in effect the absence of any aspirate. Latin, as a fellow Indo-European language, had inherited initial aspirates, although these were fewer in number than in Greek, where rho and upsilon always had initial aspiration, and where Indo-European s- had become an aspirate (compare Lat. serpo with Gk herpo, or Lat. sal with your Greek hals.)
Thanks for sharing this.
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Thanks for all of your interest and apologies for such a straight-up post.
(1) Rule #2 describes particles that do not have enough phonological weight to carry an accent of their own, so that they combine, for pronunciation purposes, with the word that follows them.
Rule #10 then describes particles that display the identical behavior, except that they combine with the preceding word instead of the following word.
To me, those would both be called "clitics", the term I know for a word which is phonologically dependent on another word while being grammatically independent. You name the second group as "enclitics" and have no name for the first group. Do you see them as being different phenomena? Why treat them so separately?
(Actually, #2 appears to include #10 in that it mentions "a word that has two accents at different places", while the only example of such a thing arises from rule #10.)
(2) I wanted to think of the accent location as being sensitive to morae rather than syllables. But the examples clearly show that while a long final syllable will drag an antepenultimate accent forward, a long penultimate syllable will not. Might you be able to talk about why that is?
Thanks for these questions.
(1) The cases under rule #2 are a mixture of proclitics and common words (such as the two conjunctions and the adverb ou). Most proclitics (including most prepositions, and most forms of the definite article) in fact do keep their accent, so a general rule can't be given. Since enclitics do follow set rules, which are much more complex than simply not having an accent, they are given their proper treatment separately in the last (and most tricky) of the rules!
(2) Analysis by morae, whereby a short syllable counts as one mora, and a long syllable as two, generally allows the rule that an acute cannot go back more than four morae, and a circumflex more than three morae - but you still have to deal with the fact that, as you say, a final long restricts an acute to three morae from the end, and face the exception given in n.13. So we decided to avoid it entirely!
