Fortson, 'Prosody of Greek Speech', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9510
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9510-fortson-prosody
@@@@95.10.9, Devine/Stephens, Prosody of Greek Speech
A.M. Devine and Laurence D. Stephens, The Prosody of Greek
Speech. New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Pp. xviii, 565. $45.00. ISBN 0-19-508546-9.
Reviewed by Benjamin W. Fortson IV -- Harvard University
fortson@fas.harvard.edu
Attempts to reconstruct the phonology of Ancient Greek, such
as W. Sidney Allen's classic Vox Graeca (Cambridge, 1968),
have generally tried to pinpoint the exact phonetics of the Greek
sound inventory (e.g. what kind of e an eta was).
DS's[[1]] goal is different: their aim is to reconstruct the
sound of Greek prosody.[[2]] To this end, they employ a "rather
different methodology", which they describe as "a sort of
archaeological laboratory phonology. . . The premise of the
method is that, although different languages have different
prosodic systems, prosodic structure does not by and large vary
crosslinguistically in a random, unlimited and unpredictable
fashion" (vii). This method has in fact been employed and
refined by DS in articles and books stretching back a good twenty
years,[[3]] many of which adumbrate ideas that are here for the
first time integrated into a comprehensive account of Greek
prosody. The result is nothing short of a masterpiece. The
authors proceed systematically from the smallest prosodic unit
(the syllable) on up through the largest (the major phrase and
utterance), devoting a chapter to each level of the prosodic
hierarchy. The chapters typically adhere to the following
format: First, DS provide background information for the
prosodic unit in question, including extremely useful[[4]] and
copious typological data from a wide range of languages, and
results from experimental studies in acoustics and phonetics.
This sets the cross-linguistic and theoretical context for an
examination of the relevant philological data: "In the second
stage, we proceeded to devise ways of testing the Greek texts,
inscriptions and musical remains for specific prosodic properties
in the general context of the background material we had
assembled, taking care to ensure the statistical significance of
the results obtained" (viii). The marriage of theory and
philology that DS strive for, where both disciplines are given
roughly equal weight, is a significant advance over previous
studies, and allows them--so they claim--to give an account of
Greek prosody which is "in some respects almost as complete as
available accounts of the prosody of many languages that can be
investigated in vivo in the laboratory" (ibid.).
Due to the scope and complexity of the book, the following
summary of the contents is necessarily superficial; after that,
however, I shall examine in more detail some of DS's findings and
methods. Chapter 1, "The Physiology of Prosody" (3-20), is an
introduction to the anatomical basis of speech production,
covering neurology, respiration, phonation, and the articulation
of speech sounds. Chapter 2, "The Syllable" (21-84), concerns
primarily the syllabification of consonant clusters, especially
muta cum liquida (stop plus resonant, e.g. kr, gl,
dm). The practice of comedy, where muta cum liquida
is tautosyllabic (in contrast to tragedy and formal passages in
comedy), reflects "the norm in colloquial Attic" (35). This is
partially at variance with syllable divisions found in
inscriptions, but these DS claim are due to the different
syllabifications associated with the artificial slowing-down of
speech that was used as a strategy "to align it with what is
being written" (38). DS's conclusions here are necessarily
speculative, but linguists who have used the orthographic
practices as evidence for particular phonological properties of
Greek should take careful note and proceed more cautiously than
has perhaps been done in the past.[[5]] In the remainder of
Chapter 2, DS disprove the old claim that Greek poetry was
sensitive to durational distinctions at the submoraic and
segmental level, finding no statistical support for the metrical
relevance of syllable onset length, intrinsic vowel and consonant
duration (differences in the length of the same vowel/consonant
in identical contexts), or contextual vowel duration (differences
in the length of the same vowel/consonant in different contexts),
and only limited evidence for a metrical distinction between C'C
and C' syllables and between heavy and superheavy syllables. If
these findings are upheld, then they represent a very important
contribution to the study of Greek metrics, upsetting as they do
a number of very old and tenacious theories.[[6]]
Chapter 3, "Rhythm" (85-156), presents and evaluates the data
that can be, and have been, taken as evidence for forming
conclusions about the rhythm of Greek speech at the level of the
word. These sources of evidence fall into three types:
phonological facts about the language, metrical texts, and
musical settings. Among other things, DS posit an underlying
rhythmic template onto which strings of syllables were mapped
consisting of a long rhythmic unit followed by a short, and
suggest various de- and re-footing rules that will be of interest
to theoretical phonologists, particularly the claim that there
was such an organizational principle independent of stress
assignment and syllable structure. The musical testimony is
treated in greater detail in Chapter 4, "Pitch" (157-194), which
concerns itself with reconstructing the surface pitch patterns of
Greek. In Hellenistic times, mismatches between accent and
melody in songs are rare; unfortunately we have only conflicting
evidence for the situation in the pre-Hellenistic age (166-7).
The Hellenistic settings agree in showing a pre-acute rise and
post-acute fall in musical pitch for medially-accented
polysyllables; the interval of the fall is on average greater
than the interval of the rise. This suggests a Mid-High-Low
contour for such words (183f.). A particularly interesting
finding is that the Delphic hymns show evidence for tonal effects
of aspirated stops on following vowels. In a number of
languages, the fundamental frequency of the beginning of a vowel
following a voiceless aspirate is higher than after a voiceless
unaspirated stop or a voiced stop, and it turns out indeed that
in polysyllables of the type FILO/MAXON, whose first syllable is
the preaccentual syllable and begins with a voiceless aspirate,
the musical setting of the initial syllable is never more than a
semitone lower than the pitch of the following stressed syllable
(the peak) (179-80). It is nothing short of astonishing that
such subtle information about ancient Greek phonetics is
available to us; one merely needs to know where to look and how
to devise the proper tests.[[7]]
The results of Chapters 3 and 4 are integrated into a
comprehensive theory of the prosody of the word in Chapter 5,
"Word Prosody" (195-223). The task that awaits the researcher
here is to determine "what were the phonetic properties of
rhythmically prominent syllables, in particular whether they were
stressed; whether the system of rhythm correlates or interacts
with that of the word accent, and if not, how the two systems
could coexist without tending to neutralize each other; and what
were the consequences for the Greek word prosodic system of the
emergence of a stress accent in later Greek" (195). Most of this
chapter is devoted to examining possible typological parallels to
their analysis of Greek: a language with a pitch-accent
coexisting with a foot-based system of rhythm independent of the
pitch-accent. Japanese, they claim, provides such a parallel:
it is also a language with a pitch-accent and a quantitative
rhythm independent of the pitch-accent (213).
The remainder of the book leaves behind the realm of
individual words and considers the prosody of words and phrases
in their syntactic contexts. Chapter 6, "Connected Speech"
(224-284), concerns sandhi-effects at word-boundary such as
resyllabification, crasis, hiatus, elision, and prodelision. DS
contribute many important observations on the syntactic domains
of these phenomena that considerably expand our knowledge of the
interaction between phonology and syntax in the language; I shall
give a sample. The domain of both coda-to-onset and
onset-to-coda resyllabification[[8]] is less restricted in the
freer styles of Euripides than in the stricter styles; this
indicates that in colloquial speech, resyllabification was not
limited to the same tight syntactically cohesive phrases as in
more deliberate speech (240f.). The rate of R(-gemination after
a short vowel (as inscriptionally ARGEMATA RRUMOIS IG
I2.314.40) was found to be highest in more cohesive syntactic
structures, especially those consisting of a prepositive
nonlexical plus a lexical; and, as it is strongly avoided in
tragic lyric, it would appear to have been a feature of
colloquial Attic deemed more appropriate for comedy (249f.). The
domain of elision is more difficult to establish since verse and
inscriptions contradict each other: in prose inscriptions, for
instance, elision of full lexical words is rare, whereas in verse
there is no such constraint. For the situation in verse, DS note
inter alia an attractive parallel from Kalmyk, where the
domain of vowel harmony, normally the word, is extended
artificially to the whole line in poetry. DS conclude (264) that
elision was not confined to the minor phrase in fluent speech.
Text editors should take note of the implications of these
observations for evaluating emendations of various passages.[[9]]
Chapter 7, "The Appositive Group" (285-374), continues the
discussion of the interface of phonology and syntax by
investigating the prosodic properties of the appositive group
(their term for the prosodic domain between the word and the
minor phrase, consisting of a pre- or postpositive and a full
lexical item). Apparent violations of Porson's, Knox's,
Hermann's, and other bridges, as is well-known, typically involve
a prepositive and a lexical word; as a prepositive was
prosodically subordinate to the following host, the two words
formed a single phonological word and are therefore not true
exceptions to these bridges.[[10]] DS examine the occurrences of
all types of mono- and disyllabic prepositives at bridges, and
combining it with evidence from inscriptions argue for the
existence in Greek of the appositive group as a prosodic domain.
The fact that certain kinds of prepositives are admitted before
metrical bridges more readily in comedy than in tragedy is taken
as evidence that in deliberate speech these appositives did not
form a prosodic unit with the following word, but did in more
relaxed fluent speech; this has parallels in other languages such
as Madurese (310). DS point out that the formation of appositive
groups is not only conditioned by the non-lexical in question
(for which they are able to set up a categorial hierarchy, p.
340), but is also sensitive to syntactic characteristics of the
potential host material, such as branchingness. For instance, in
the early plays of Euripides, a heavy monosyllabic preposition
may stand at Porson's bridge if it is in the discontinuous or
head-interrupted configuration [N P N]PP (e.g. NERTE/RWN E)K
DWMA/TWN Alc. 1073), but not if it flanks a branching NP,
i.e. [P NP]PP (e.g. E)K TW=N FI/LWNH.F. 1234). Thus "head
interrupted structure provides an easier environment for
subordination than the head flanking structure in branching
prepositional phrases" (335); what DS posit here would accord
well with many other languages, where clitics cannot flank a
branching phrase. Among the myriad topics covered in the rest of
the chapter are the prosodic status of proclitics: DS argue
rather strongly, based especially on the musical evidence, that
proclitics were not atonic, contra most traditional
theories on the subject.
A similar set of metrical, musical, and inscriptional
inquiries form the material of Chapter 8, "The Minor Phrase"
(376-408), and Chapter 9, "The Major Phrase and Utterance"
(409-455), which concern the final--and highest--levels of
prosodic organization. DS show, continuing some of the
investigations of Chapter 6, that onset-to-coda resyllabification
of clusters consisting of s plus stop is constrained; it
was licensed within the minor phrase (e.g. between verb and
another part of the verb phrase) but usually not interphrasally
(between words belonging to two different constituents); in those
cases of interphrasal resyllabification, one of the two phrases
was most commonly non-branching (383), a fact fully expected from
linguistic universals. The examination of both metrical and
inscriptional evidence shows that verbs were phrased with the
subject only by default, that is, only when the verb was not
modified by other material (392). Chapter 8 also considers what
phonetic properties that minor phrase had; this is best done
again by examining the musical settings, which show, not
surprisingly, that the first peak in the phrase is pitched
highest, followed by a gradual decline in pitch (downtrend or
catathesis) with secondary rises for later peaks within the
phrase (408). Chapter 9 further examines catathesis, this time
over the domain of whole sentences, in its cross-linguistic
context. Chapter 10, "Topic and Focus" (456-497), concerns the
phonetic realization of these syntactic categories in Greek, and
allied phenomena. The Delphic hymns show pitch rise correlating
with emphatic focus (479). A particularly welcome section
concerns discontinuous phrases in Greek and the interaction of
discontinuity and resyllabification; DS's results here should be
extended by other researchers to Latin and the other ancient
Indo-European languages (480f.). This final chapter is followed
by a Bibliography (498-562) and Index (563-565).[[11]]
The careful, systematic, and penetrating evaluation of reams
of philological data in the light of a highly sophisticated
knowledge of phonetics and theoretical linguistics is the
greatest contribution that this book has to offer. One is
hard-pressed to think of questions that they did not ask. Where
their treatment is shakier is in the handling of morphology and
diachrony. As far as I can tell, in their stated attempt to
reconstruct the prosody of Greek, DS never actually define what
they mean by "Greek"--an omission that leads to some infelicities
that I will talk about below. Most of the book, it turns out, is
concerned with 5th-century Attic, but there is an uncomfortably
large inclusion of data from other dialects and from other time
periods that is all lumped together with the Attic data; the
whole tends then to get analyzed, rather monolithically, as of a
piece. DS are of course fully aware that "Greek" refers to any
of several spatially and temporally heterogeneous entities, but
when treating more than one variety of Greek, one must be careful
to qualify the domain over which one's conclusions are supposed
to obtain.[[12]]
An instance of this is their analysis of the syllabification
of muta cum liquida in Chapter 2. I shall treat this in
some detail, not to be picky, but because an account that is more
sensitive to chronological layering has long been needed for this
particular issue, and leads to some unexpected findings. When
they arrive at their conclusion that tautosyllabic muta cum
liquida was the norm for colloquial Attic, DS mention that
variation from this norm "is due to the influence of non-Attic
verse; in Homer, for instance, internal muta cum liquida
is usually heterosyllabic, with exceptions involving liquids
rather than nasals" (35). This is the only hint we get from DS
that there was a chronological difference in the way muta cum
liquida was syllabified; they conspicuously omit any mention
of correptio Attica (the shift in the scansion of muta
cum liquida from Epic to Classical Attic). This lack
of attention to chronology, while not damaging to their central
claims, leads to a rather haphazard account of certain sound laws
and other material. On pp. 39-41, DS invoke a body of
"linguistic evidence ... almost all [of which] indicates
unequivocally that the syllable divisions of normal speech are
just those found in the metrical evidence" (39): the rhythm rule
for formation of the comparative and superlative; three sound
laws (Wheeler's Law, the neuter nouns law, and Vendryes's Law);
and the reduplication of the perfect. As far as 5th-century
Athens goes, Wheeler's Law (whereby originally oxytone
dactyl-shaped words or word-final sequences retract the accent to
the penult, e.g. POIKI/LOS < *POIKILO/S, cp. Sanskrit pe-ala-
decorated') and the neuter nouns law (whereby neuters in -I/ON
retracted the accent onto the antepenult if it was light, e.g.
PUKTI/ON but QU/RION) are irrelevant, since both were Common
Greek developments. The rhythm rule and the reduplication rule
for perfects, it turns out, are rather more difficult evidence
than at first appearance, and none of the difficulties has, to my
knowledge, been sufficiently discussed in the literature.
The rhythm rule states that the comparative and superlative
endings are -O/TEROS -O/TATOS after a heavy syllable, but
-W/TEROS -W/TATOS after a light. DS note that for this rule,
muta cum liquida is generally heterosyllabic, especially
with core vocabulary (MAKRO/TEROS PUKNO/TEROS); but that "some
marginal forms show variation across the corpus of Greek literary
records", for which they cite BARUPOTMW/TATOS Eur. Phoen.
1345 vs. BARUPOTMO/TATOS Plu. TG 5, E)RUQRW/TEROS Pl.
Tim. 83b vs. E)RUQRO/TEROS Anaxandr. 22, and
EU)TEKNW/TATOS Eur. Hec. 581 vs. EU)TEKNO/TATOS Diod. Sic.
4.74. DS simply list these data without commentary, and it is
not at all clear what conclusions are supposed to be drawn.
First of all, when was the rule actually operative? Forms like
MAKRO/TEROS PUKNO/TEROS fly in the face of the view that muta
cum liquida was tautosyllabic in 5th-century Attic, if
the forms are at all relevant to 5th-century Attic; the fact that
they are "core vocabulary" means that they have probably been
lexicalized and preserve evidence for earlier phonological
features (MAKRO/EROS, for instance, is already in Homer and scans
with heterosyllabic muta cum liquida as is normal in
epic). The "marginal forms" are the best evidence for synchronic
rules, as the comparative and superlatives of uncommon words are
going to be created on the spot using productive phonology and
morphology. As these "marginal forms" show variation, we have to
ask what the variation means. One first notices a difference in
chronology: BARUPOTMW/TATOS E)RUQRW/TEROS EU)TEKNW/TATOS are
between two and five centuries older than BARUPOTMO/TATOS
E)RUQRO/TEROS EU)TEKNO/TATOS.[[13]] This makes it look like
Greek started out with heterosyllabic muta cum liquida
(MAKRO/TEROS Homer), then tautosyllabic after correptio
Attica (BARUPOTMW/TATOS), and later heterosyllabic again
(BARUPOTMO/TATOS).[[14]] If so, then the 5th-century forms like
BARUPOTMW/TATOS may be evidence for tautosyllabic muta
cum liquida, assuming the rhythm rule was operative at the
time.[[15]] However, these forms must be considered together
with other unexpected comparatives and superlatives, and they are
more frequent in the manuscripts than the handbooks tell us.
Good manuscripts of Plato transmit E)MMETRW/TATOS at Leg.
11.926a, and of other authors forms such as E)LEUQERO/TEROS A)NI
R(W/TATOS FILOKINDPNW/TATOS EU)DOCW/TATOS O(MOIW/TATOS
I)SXPRW/TATOS; but all of these have been deemed to be faulty
(see R. Kuehner and F. Blass, Ausfuehrliche Grammatik der
griechischen Sprache3 [Hannover, 1890] I1 558-9). Have these
unsavory variants been rejected on good philological grounds, or
simply because they do not agree with a prescribed rule in the
grammar-books?[[16]]
Evidence for tautosyllabic muta cum liquida culled from
the reduplication of the perfect-a subject which has received
much attention in recent theoretical literature[[17]]-should also
not be invoked without some caveats. As is well known, the
reduplicating syllable consists of the first consonant of the
root plus -E- if the resultant reduplicating syllable would be
light; otherwise the reduplicating syllable is simply E)- (e.g.
PAI/W PE/-PAIKA but PTAI/W E)/-PTAIKA). "Lighter" muta cum
liquida clusters are tautosyllabic, to judge by KLE/PTW
KE/-KLOFA, TRE/FW TE/-TROFA, but "heavier" muta cum
liquida clusters show both patterns (e.g. BLASTA/NW
BE-BLA/STHKA and E)-BLA/STHKA).[[18]] Other consonant clusters
also show both patterns: KTA/OMAI KE/-KTHMAI but Ionic
E)/-KTHMAI, PTH/SSW PE-PTHW/S Homer but Attic E)/-PTHXA. DS
conclude from this that "[s]uch forms are evidence that
resyllabification failed across the reduplication seam, not that
these clusters were regularly assigned to the onset word medially
in prehistoric Greek." If this be the explanation for KE/-KTHMAI
etc., it then becomes ad hoc to conclude that KE/KLOFA etc. is
due rather to tautosyllabicity of the cluster. If in the
KE/KTHMAI cases, resyllabification of the cluster failed across
the reduplication seam (certainly a possibility), then that is at
variance with the scansion of these clusters in poetry (as
heterosyllabic; see p. 32). It is also possible, though, that
the KE/KTHMAI cases reflect a purely morphological, and not a
morphophonological, process; some speakers appear to have
overgeneralized Ce-reduplication (a morphological rule) at
the expense of simple e-reduplication. This would have
happened by their having failed to acquire the phonological rule
that originally blocked application of Ce-reduplication
before particular consonant clusters. Under this explanation of
KE/KTHMAI etc., we do not run into conflict with the metrical
evidence, as happened with the syllabification account--and the
metrical evidence is after all supposed to reflect the actual
Attic syllabification more closely than anything else, according
to DS's premises.
It appears that only Vendryes's Law (whereby properispomena
retract the accent to the antepenult if the antepenult is light,
e.g. E(/TOIMOS < E(TOI=MOS) unequivocally supports DS's position,
as it is a specifically Attic rule, and apparently a fairly
recent one (see p. 102). Forms like A)/GROIKOS A)/XREIOS from
A)GROI=KOS A)XREI=OS do show that muta cum liquida, at the
time Vendryes's Law operated, was tautosyllabic in Attic. As I
noted at the outset of this discussion, none of the problems with
the other evidence vitiates DS's claims; I merely wish to point
out the delicacy with which such evidence, varying both
chronologically and dialectally, needs to be handled.
Another unclarity that one encounters passim in
PGS, and that I have already alluded to, is whether comedy
is supposed to be the best witness to Attic pronunciation writ
large, or just to colloquial, fluent, and rapid Attic
pronunciation. Sometimes DS seem to be saying the former, as
with the muta cum liquida cases, at other times the
latter. If the former is their opinion, then by rights comedy
should always reflect Attic phonetics better than tragedy; but a
number of times it is rather tragedy that, by virtue of its
stricter metrical rules, is claimed to evince particular prosodic
phenomena most clearly. An example is Porson's Law, which
prohibits a break between the first arsis and the following
longum if the arsis is long (so | - # - x || is not allowed,
where # is word-boundary). DS support the claim that these
syllables must have been too long in speech to be able to be
mapped onto an arsis, and they argue that this extra duration is
due to prepausal lengthening of the same sort that accounts for
brevis in longo, and that is independently evidenced by musical
settings. So far so good; however, if the contextual lengthening
of long syllables was a phonetic fact of colloquial Greek, then
it would be expected that comedy should have the strictest
constraints on the mapping of such overlong syllables, not
tragedy and the iambographers; yet Porson's Law is absent from
comedy. To explain this distribution, DS claim that "it is
probable that the constraint against full word boundary following
a subordinated syllable is relaxed in the conversational speech
styles on which the dialogue of comedy is based" (132, cp. also
280).[[19]] This sounds fine on its own, but has the unfortunate
result of contradicting the earlier claim that tragedy was not an
accurate reflection of 5th-century Attic muta-cum-liquida
syllabification. The only way I can see to salvage the argument
is to say that, as in some other languages, muta cum
liquida in Greek was heterosyllabic in deliberate speech (cp.
note 5 above) but tautosyllabic in fast speech; then tragedy,
rather than reflecting archaic or dialectal pronunciation, would
mirror the syllabification in careful, and not rapid, speech.
Then one could say that comedy represents on all counts more
rapid speech. But this approach has problems of its own;
Euripidean superlatives like BARUPOTMW/TATOS and EU)TEKNW/TATOS
could not then represent both the heterosyllabic muta
cum liquida of careful speech and evidence of
tautosyllabic muta cum liquida at the same time, unless
one wanted to claim an artificiality of his morphology and
phonology rivaled only by Homer's.
My only other piece of criticism concerns the presentational
style of the work. It is regrettable that a book of such great
interdisciplinary interest and importance is so difficult to
read. The prose is dense and often telegraphic; examples of the
various phenomena are frequently given without commentary,
leaving the reader to figure out how they exemplify what. DS
assume a rather vast knowledge of both linguistics and Greek
metrics on the part of the reader; I fear that its accessibility
both to linguists who lack a strong Classical training,[[20]] and
to Classicists lacking linguistic training, will be impaired
because of this. Instead of globally referring the reader at the
outset to various standard reference works for definitions and
explanations of the technical terms (x), it would have been far
preferable to have provided a glossary, or to have at least
systematically defined such terms as they appeared (which is only
occasionally done). The long lists of cross-linguistic data, one
of the book's major strengths, are not always fully integrated
into the surrounding discussion, and often not even relevant; at
times DS seem to indulge in sharing such information just out of
the sheer pleasure of sharing it.[[21]] I personally enjoy
no-holds-barred narration of scientific and cross-linguistic
trivia (in the word's most non-deprecatory sense), for it is all
fascinating to me; but it can be distracting and make the import
of the broader context-setting hazy. The main conclusions of
each section are not sufficiently flagged or highlighted, often
buried in a wealth of surrounding detail; chapter summaries are
sometimes given, sometimes not.
In spite of these few negative remarks and niggling over
aspects of the methodology, I must emphasize that I enjoyed
reading this book more than almost any other in Linguistics or
the Classics in the past several years, and it is a spectacular
piece of scholarship. PGS should be read by every
Classicist even remotely concerned with Ancient Greek as the
living entity it once was; an initial investment of stamina will
yield great rewards. The linguistic and experimental background
should be tremendously eye-opening and mind-broadening, and the
amassing of all this material in one place is a remarkable feat,
for which we should be very grateful. It is worthwhile for
Classicists to know, for instance, that a phenomenon exactly
comparable to verse-final brevis in longo is known from
Hausa verse; both the Greek and the Hausa facts are but two
examples of a very common cross-linguistic tendency for word- and
phrase-final syllables to be generally weaker than
word-internally (79f.). PGS should likewise be read by
every historical linguist; it is a model for how to glean
detailed prosodic and structural information from the records of
a dead language. Although the details of surface phonetic
implementations may appear at first glance to be inconsequential
for linguistic theory, it is precisely this level which encodes
an enormous wealth of information about the underlying machinery
of a language, and it is this level which is transmitted from
generation to generation. The efforts that have culminated in
this volume provide a nearly bottomless source of real advances
and ideas that should spawn years of fruitful research.
NOTES
[[1]]. Abbreviations: DS = Devine and Stephens; PGS =
The Prosody of Greek Speech. I would like to thank Mark
Hale for discussing certain issues with me; needless to say, I
alone am responsible for the views herein.
[[2]]. I shall use the term "prosody" in its linguistic, not
metrical, sense, to denote the division of speech into intonation
groups and their phonetic properties (stress, syllabification,
pitch, etc.).
[[3]]. These are conveniently listed in a separate section (pp.
561-2) at the end of the general Bibliography.
[[4]]. DS are of course not the first to consider Greek in light
of typological parallels (witness the works of W.S. Allen), but
the cross-linguistic and other background material that they
provide is far richer; indeed, in the Preface they state, "We
hoped that a concise yet fairly comprehensive account of this
material with its associated bibliography might serve as a
convenient sourcebook for future students and researchers" (vii).
For more discussion of this aspect of PGS see below.
[[5]]. Some details in this section raise a few questions. DS
evaluate such common orthographic practices as doubling the first
consonant of clusters (e.g. METESSTIN IG I2.26.8, DESSMWN
IV.1484.218, EKKTOR CIG IV.xviii) as reflecting the
syllable divisions of artificially slow rates of speech, in which
coda consonants would get lengthened. This necessitates a
different explanation for end-of-line divisions before consonant
clusters like E.KTEI IG II2.949.2. One has to have some
principled way of determining which of these orthographic
practices were linguistically real. Does E.KTEI represent some
other syllabification fact about artificially slow rates of
speech, or is it merely due to an orthographic prohibition
against dividing consonant clusters at line-end, whatever the
rationale behind such a rule may have been (e.g., orthographic
preservation of morpheme boundary)?
[[6]]. The tables at the end of the chapter (81-84) showing the
relative percentages of types of line-final syllables may be
misleading. They show, ostensibly, that for words of particular
shapes, and for all words in the archaic pentameter, line-final
-' is far less frequent than -'C or -'(C). For these statistics
to mean anything, they would first have to be compared to the
overall frequencies of these syllables word-finally, which it
seems DS (uncharacteristically, I might add) have not done.
Without that as a control, these tables lose their value.
[[7]]. I for one would be interested to see DS's test extended
to voiced stops and unaspirated voiceless stops; is, for example,
the rise in pitch from a preaccentual syllable beginning with a
voiced consonant to the peak usually greater than a semitone?
Cross-linguistically, voiced consonants can lower the fundamental
frequency of the beginning of a following vowel. Perhaps DS
conducted such a test already, but without conclusive results.
[[8]]. The first is what is responsible for the short scansion
of final -'C before vowel (the final consonant becomes the onset
of the following syllable: C.V > .CV); the second is what is
responsible for word-initial consonant clusters "making position"
(so .CCV > C.CV).
[[9]]. As for instance on p. 244: in tragedy, word-initial
muta cum liquida seems only to be resyllabified (i.e.,
becomes heterosyllabic and makes position) when preceded by a
right-linking nonlexical (e.g. DIA\ XRO/NOU Eur. I.A. 636,
O( XRO/NOS Soph. fr. 832 Nauck); the resyllabification is
therefore linguistically real, and DS rightly warn against
emending these out of existence, as has sometimes been done. (It
is curious that comedy does not have evidence for such
resyllabification, if DS claim that comedy more accurately
reflects the phonetics of colloquial Attic than does tragedy; see
discussion further below.)
[[10]]. For the record, this was already recognized for Porson's
bridge by J.G.J. Hermann in his 1800 edition of Euripides's
Hecuba.
An interesting problem, not noted to my knowledge by DS, is
the following. The last metron of the trimeter cannot be filled
by a word of the shape - - x; to explain this, DS posit a
"heavy syllable prolongation rule", whereby in a word of the
shape - - x, the first of the two contiguous long syllables was
lengthened, so that it became too long to be mapped onto the
first arsis of the last metron (120). Now, as just noted above,
common exceptions to Porson's Law include (long) proclitic
followed by a trisyllable, so | # - # - x ||. If the resultant
proclitic + host sequence formed a new single "word", then this
"word" ought to be identical to a word of the shape - - x; but
precisely such a word is forbidden from filling the last metron.
On the assumption that DS's lengthening rule is correct (it need
not be--why should it affect specifically the first long syllable
of a sequence - - x ?), perhaps a proclitic, after forming a
"word" with the following word, did not then undergo lengthening;
the morpheme boundary may have still been salient (a view not all
theoreticians would agree with). Alternatively, the
admissibility of | # - # - x || may be evidence of some other
prosodic difference between words and otherwise
identically-shaped "words" consisting of clitic + host.
[[11]]. The Index is unfortunately too brief.
[[12]]. It is difficult to know what conclusions are to be drawn
about "Greek" from a metrical constraint that is observed, say,
only by Callimachus, or from the fact that Demosthenes studiously
avoids sequences of more than two short syllables. DS for the
most part put all of these idiosyncrasies on an equal footing,
apparently under the supposition that they are pieces of one
large puzzle. This approach need not be wrong; it should,
however, be pointed out that such data are inherently ambiguous
as to whether a given phenomenon was idiolectal or not.
[[13]]. Additional forms not found in DS may support this
conclusion: earlier are EU)TEKNW/TATOS Eur. Hec. 620,
E)RUQRW/TATON Pl. Epin. 987c, DUSPOTMW/TERON Men.
Mis. p.119 Mein, and later are XALUKRO/TEROS Nic.
Al. 59.613, BARUPOTMO/TEROS Plu. 2.989e and
BARUPOTMO/TATOS Ph. 1.637. However, E)RUQRO/TERON Dromo 1 is
already 4th-century. The papyri from the Ptolemaic period
consistently use -O/TEROS -O/TATOS after muta cum liquida
(Edwin Mayser, Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der
Ptolemaeerzeit I2 [Berlin/Leipzig, 1938] 58).
[[14]]. In the history of Latin, a similar series of events
appears to have taken place: in Plautus, muta cum liquida
does not make position, but in the earlier history of Latin it
must have been heterosyllabic to account for the -e- of
consecrare, perpetrare, cerebrum, genetrix, and other
words where the medial short vowel would have weakened to
-i- if the syllable had been open (see M. Leumann,
Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre [Muenchen, 1977] 83).
[[15]]. But on this topic, DS write, "The phonological
lengthening [of -O- to -W-] was no longer operative at the time
of the loss of digamma: KENO/TEROS STENO/TEROS; but this does
not mean that such forms did not have some phonetic lengthening
of the stem vowel; forms like STENW/TEROS are later analogical
reformations" (104). Here it sounds like the rule no longer
existed, if a form like STENW/TEROS came about through analogy
and not through application of the rule; if that is true, then
BARUPOTMW/TATOS and its ilk cannot be used as evidence for
phonetic facts, since it would also have been produced by
analogy. None of this is a likely analysis of the data:
STENO/TEROS, as all the handbooks correctly tell us, was created
and lexicalized while the digamma was still there
(*STENGGO/TEROS), and STENW/TEROS was innovated later by
application of the rhythm rule for a stem that had become
synchronically STEN-.
[[16]]. An additional complication is the merger of omicron and
omega; this is evidenced orthographically as early as the 3rd
century B.C. and confusion becomes rampant by the 2nd century for
the Egyptian Greek of the papyri, although not for Attic until
much later except in crude texts; see E. Sturtevant, The
Pronunciation of Greek and Latin2 (Philadelphia, 1940) 47,
and L. Threatte, The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions I:
Phonology (Berlin/New York, 1980) 223-4.
[[17]]. See D. Steriade, Greek Prosodies and the Nature of
Syllabification (diss. M.I.T., 1982), and "Greek accent: A
case for preserving structure", Linguistic Inquiry
19:271f.
[[18]]. Two of DS's examples of reduplicating E)-in this section
may actually be of a somewhat different nature: from BLA/PTW,
BE/BLAFA and KATEBLAFOTES IG VII.303.51, and from GLU/FW,
GE/GLUMMAI and E)CE/GLUMMAI It is curious that the two forms in
each pair with E)-reduplication have a preverb. One is reminded
of Latin tango tetigi but contingo contigi, where
the reduplicator in the perfect is omitted when preceded by a
preverb. In the case of the Greek facts, one cannot speak of
omission of the perfect reduplicator per se, of course, and
perhaps the resemblance between the two cases is simply
coincidental. It is again extremely desirable--as with the
comparative and superlative data--that someone go through all the
variant reduplicated forms with close attention to both
chronology and dialect.
[[19]]. Compare W.S. Allen, on almost the identical topic
(Accent and Rhythm [Cambridge, 1973] 312): "In comedy the
natural dynamic patterns are in no way suppressed or
distorted--it is simply that the composition does not display the
same care in ensuring that they shall be regular (and indeed to
this extent unnatural)."
[[20]]. Especially in metrics, but also in the languages
themselves; none of the sometimes lengthy quotes from the Greek
grammarians is provided with a translation--at most,
occasionally, a paraphrase.
[[21]]. For example, Chapter 1 contains on the one hand some
very basic introductory material, such as an outline of the
classification of the Greek sounds; but we also learn, for
instance, in a section on fundamental frequency, that "[d]uring
normal speech, subglottal pressure changes at rates in the range
of 3-8 cm H2O per second: the push in the stomach can
produce an average rate of change of 25 cm H2O/s"
(14). The reason for including this datum may understandably be
lost on most readers.