Greek Accent and the Rational

Abstract

The description of our accent system by Professor Dodds as ‘Byzantine’ is of course disingenuous. Its Alexandrian origin and evolution are taken for granted since Laum and Schwyzer; the fact that Barrett could so swiftly and soundly adapt the peripheral matter of synenclisis to the system's own basic principles is a pointer to its internal soundness and consistency. Again, that a system is complex is no reason for its being jettisoned; the language itself is complex. Nor does Dodds' defeated acceptance of Dutch-English mispronunciation strengthen a case against the accent. What I think he meant was that no-one since Byzantine times has been able to interpret the accent marks in significant terms of sound; that we are therefore better rid, not of a system, but of a clueless labyrinth inefficiently described in an insufferably tedious jargon and entirely unrelated to the language which it was invented to illuminate.This position would be understandable if it were now possible to hold it. It is farcical in the light that philologists/linguists are now throwing on Greek accent. The obstacles they have had to overcome fall broadly into two classes: first, the passive, inertial persistence of the formal, meaningless ‘rules’ on one hand, and, on the other, the cloudy mysticism of those who have never thought to examine the term ‘music’ in their glib phrase ‘musical Greek accent’. The latter class falls into two sub-classes: those who (like Maas) prosaically forbade the search after Greek pronunciation because it was musical (like stressless organ-notes!); and a few who, following A. J. Ellis and Rouse, would have us believe that they are giving us Homer ‘as he was sung’, when they apply to the hexameter what they (as I hope to prove, wrongly) attribute to Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the famous passage where his subject was not verse—but prose!