Ancient Greek thought on prosody: through time and Latin eyes

拉丁语作者写拉丁语单词口音听起来像希腊语作者写希腊口音。例如，拉丁语作者告诉我们，如果一个拉丁重音音节是单词中倒数第二个音节，并且有一个长元音，那么这个音节就有一个“抑扬格”，前提是最后一个音节的元音是短的。在希腊语中也是如此，现代学者要么（i）评论说拉丁语语法学家在口音问题上模仿希腊语语法学家，好像他们没有注意到拉丁语和希腊语是不同的语言，要么（ii）认为拉丁语的口音确实与希腊语非常相似，有重音和回旋发音，以及非常类似于希腊语的发音规则，但这两种观点都忽略了一个重要的问题。到我们的拉丁语语法学家写作的时候，希腊语中的重音和抑扬音之间的区别是不大可能听得见的。因此，如果我们怀疑某些拉丁词有一个无意义的抑扬格的说法，那么，至少在拉丁语语法家遇到这种说法的时候，某些希腊词在任何可听意义上都有抑扬格的说法，也不会比这种说法更有说服力。此外，在抑扬格和尖锐重音在希腊语中不再听起来不同很久之后，希腊语法学家继续在他们对语言的描述中使用这种区别。除其他概念外，长元音和短元音之间的区别也是如此。这些特征不仅是过去的遗物，而且在希腊语法思想中获得了不同的地位。它们已经成为抽象的特征--换句话说，是帮助语言整体描述的技术手段。例如，一些元音在理论上是长的，而一些在理论上是短的概念使得继续非常简洁地描述希腊口音的可能位置是可行的（重音可以落在最后三个音节中的任何一个上，除非最后一个音节包含一个“长元音”）。在这种情况下，当拉丁语语法家从希腊语语法家那里继承了一个概念，如尖音节和回旋音节之间的区别时，他们直接将概念带入他们自己的描述系统的抽象层次。对于拉丁语来说，这个概念作为一种技术手段几乎没有什么实际用途，但它的抽象性质使它很容易被取代，而不会对实际发音产生任何影响。相反，当拉丁语语法家对希腊语语法家完全听得见的事物进行陈述时，（例如重音福尔斯落在的实际音节上），这些应该被认真对待，作为关于拉丁语发音的陈述。这里的一个例子是拉丁语语法家的学说，即enclitics -que，-ve，-ne和-ce导致重音落在前一个音节上，不管音节的轻重现代学者经常怀疑这可能永远是真的，并怀疑希腊语法学家在希腊语中写类似的序列时受到了不当的影响。但是，关于哪个音节重读的陈述不能解释为只属于抽象的层次：他们应该被认真对待作为关于拉丁语的声音的陈述。拟议的项目将收集和提出希腊语法传统中关于重音和元音长度的抽象思维的证据（两者都属于古老的“韵律”学科），并将发展的假设，希腊语语法描述的抽象特征-包括一些成为抽象的语言变化-作为抽象特征被拉丁语语法思维所接受。该项目旨在鼓励世界上其他语法传统中更多关于类似问题的工作。此外，它的目的是通过提请注意从一种语言引入另一种语言的类别来描述一种语言的历史和现代技术，丰富学校的语言教学和学习，从而使外语不那么陌生。

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.