Language Fun!

I was assigned Greek homework for the weekend, and I'm doing my best to accomplish it. Some of it's pretty easy; I've been working on memorizing the Greek alphabet for ages (...look, I'm not good with symbols, okay?), and I pretty much have that down. Pronouncing the words appropriately? Tricky, because I have a hell of a lot of trouble with unaspirated vs. aspirated on unvoiced consonants, but I can mangle my way through approximately.

And then there's trying to learn how the diacritical marks for Greek work.

Oh dear.

Now, mind, this textbook is, unusually enough, actually explaining them. I've seen far too many textbooks that just explain rough vs. smooth breathing on words starting with vowels, and then cheerfully pour the whole barrel of marks down on vocab words without a damn bit of explanation. This one is explaining how things are doing why they're doing! And why certain letters are morphing around when words are jammed together, both vowels and consonants.

But...well. I am being rapidly and brutally reminded that being able to understand every word in a sentence does not always mean understanding the sentence itself. "Contonation is the combination of the rise of pitch generally thought of as the accent with the necessary return or fall to standard pitch which follows it," the text says, and...um. Okay. That's what Contonation means! Apparently! It...has to do with pitch!

And I've finally had the use of the grave mark explained to me. "What it represented in terms of pitch in classical pronunciation is uncertain. In a connected utterance, the grave replaces the acute accent over the [ultimate syllable] of a word not followed by punctuation (or an enclitic)." That really clears things up. Except for clearing things up. But at least now I know that whatever the heck the grave means, I'm not really expected to pronounce it accurately in class. So that's a win!

I can see that Greek and I have some wrangling to do this summer. Oh yes indeed.