Lesson #452: Latin punctuation and stress added to the Greek language
When the Romans conquered Greece (and several centuries after that), and tried, among other things, to learn the language, they realised that Greek was not as phonetic as Latin, or as phonetic as we presume today. For example, the word ”ΕΛΛΑΣ” (no lower-case letters back then) was actually pronounced “hellas”, with a stress on the A. So, they did two things:
1) they added various symbols (similar to ones used in Arabic but also Byzantine hymnbooks) to show them how and where to breathe, one typical example being the “daseia”, which was a sound like modern-day English letter H. The symbol was similar to a small c before the word (and eventually over the first vowel). Many words, such as Ερμης, Ηφαιστος, Ελλας, αιμορραγια, ομοφυλοφιλος, ετερος, etc were pronounced with this “h” sound, and therefore became what we now know as Hermes, Hephaestus, Hellas, hemorrage, homo(sexual), hetero(sexual) and so on…
2) The Romans, who didn’t know which vowel to stress, added various stress symbols (known as the “polytonic system”) which told them how to stress the word. Most verbs for example ended in -ω and took a ”περισπωμένη” (a broken horizontal line), whereas other stresses might take an ”οξεια” (acute) a ”βαρεια”(heavy) or even an ”υπογεγγραμμενη” (understroke). All of the above rules were simplified in 1981, when Greece adopted the “monotonic” system, with a single stroke marking which of the syllables is stressed, and no “daseia” (since the pronunciation had become obsolete anyway, people say “Ellada” or at least “Ellas” and not “Hellas” nowadays).
3) an interesting note here was that the letter R was a vowel in Ancient Greek. With a daseia, it sounded very much like an Arabic letter (which I can’t write here), the first letter in the name of former UN Secretary Butros-Butros Galli (it’s not a G, it’s that letter I mean, which is something between a W, a H, a Y, and an A). That’s what the Greek R sounded like (ok, you can imagine that without the daseia it sounded like the French R, so with it, it was just a lot harder and deeper).