Linguistics (cont.)
- For the Classical scholar today, a speech of Demosthenes is a written text, but what did it actually sound like when it was first delivered? It is obviously dangerous for us to rely on our intuitions as native speakers of English, which we inevitably tend to do, arguably even in silent reading. To what extent is it possible to reconstruct the long lost Classical Greek patterns of rhythm, accent, phrasing and intonation? Using the results of experimental studies on living languages, we can formulate hypotheses about Greek and then devise ways of testing them on metrical texts, musical remains and punctuated inscriptions. This strategy leads to a surprisingly detailed reconstruction of Greek prosody, showing that dead languages are not quite as dead as people think.
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