K antičkim korijenima prozodije
Towards the Ancient Roots of Prosody

A Contribution to the Reconstruction of Ancient Greek Pronunciation

Summary/Abstract: The starting assumption of this paper is that language lives only in speech and that the experience of understanding is based on listening. However, in the case of ancient Greek a problem appears since we do not have a faithful image of the acoustic dimensions of the language, particularly its prosody. That is why we undertook the reconstruction of the prosodic structure of the classical Greek accents instantiating them with the Croatian accentual equivalents (including also those that belong to the Croatian dialects). The accents are presented by musical notation which is appropriate both for the Croatian and for the ancient Greek accentual system, and a new description of Neoshtokavian accents is given. At the same time the reconstruction of the Greek prosodic analysis is presented and compared with Croatian traditional prosody. It is shown that there are much greater differences in the very approach to prosody then in the prosody itself. The conclusion is that the Croatian traditional (scholarly) prosody is not quite pertinent to Croatian language and that it can be much better described by the principles reconstructed on the example of the ancient Greek language.

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