How to Macronize Any Greek Text - Where do the long vowels go?

How do we figure out the long and short vowels in Ancient Greek texts? Which vowels are long and which are short? Understanding when Ancient Greek vowels are long and short is a mandatory part of learning the language, not only to be fluent readers, but just to appreciate the literature. Let's learn how to tell when α, ι, and υ are long (ᾱ ῑ ῡ) or short (ᾰ ῐ ῠ).
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
00:00 Intro
00:59 Why "Koine" is pronounced differently in English from Modern Greek
01:56 Why learning vowel length is mandatory
04:02 Classical Attic Vowels
12:38 Good News, Bad News
14:32 Vowels regularly long
32:13 The main tools you'll need
39:53 Let's macronize some text! (Xenophon, Ephodion 2)
1:10:11 Conclusion

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

🏛 Learn Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Old English at the Ancient Language Institute! And sign up for the Summer Immersion Greek Camp: ancientlanguage.com ⬅ 📜 ERRATA: Typo at 23:38 - θυγατήρ should be θυγάτηρ. 🏺Ancient Greek by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/ancient-greek-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables Logeion: logeion.uchicago.edu/κρηπίς Wiktionary: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/κρηπίς Latinitium dictionaries: latinitium.com/latin-dictionaries/?t=lsn47288 Ephodion 2 on Amazon (Italy): www.amazon.it/Ephòdion-Alessandro-Barbone/dp/8895611209/ref=sr_1_1?crid=HB1X00C4HDNR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.cQ7bWnTnBab0b9IiW8mMbA.J7zKoJpEhqtXhKEDfvjEeAk_7dmt3EvQezowEVAFpRU&dib_tag=se&keywords=ephodion+2&qid=1710752358&sprefix=ephodion,aps,96&sr=8-1 🦂 Support my work on Patreon: www.patreon.com/LukeRanieri 📚 Luke Ranieri Audiobooks: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com 🤠 Take my course LATIN UNCOVERED on StoryLearning, including my original Latin adventure novella "Vir Petasātus" learn.storylearning.com/lu-promo?affiliate_id=3932873 🦂 Sign up for my Latin Pronunciation & Conversation series on Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/54058196 ☕ Support my work with PayPal: paypal.me/lukeranieri And if you like, do consider joining this channel: kzbin.info/door/Lbiwlm3poGNh5XSVlXBkGAjoin 🏛 Latin by the Ranieri-Dowling Method: luke-ranieri.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/latin-by-the-ranieri-dowling-method-latin-summary-of-forms-of-nouns-verbs-adjectives-pronouns-audio-grammar-tables 🏛 Ancient Greek in Action · Free Greek Lessons: kzbin.info/aero/PLU1WuLg45SixsonRdfNNv-CPNq8xUwgam 👨‍🏫 My Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata playlist · Free Latin Lessons: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oGjLlWpvbq6tpLc 🦂 ScorpioMartianus (my channel for content in Latin, Ancient Greek, & Ancient Egyptian) kzbin.info 🎙 Hundreds of hours of Latin & Greek audio: lukeranieri.com/audio 🌍 polýMATHY website: lukeranieri.com/polymathy/ 🌅 polýMATHY on Instagram: instagram.com/lukeranieri/ 🦁 Legio XIII Latin Language Podcast: kzbin.info 👕 Merch: teespring.com/stores/scorpiomartianus 🦂 www.ScorpioMartianus.com 🦅 www.LukeRanieri.com 📖 My book Ranieri Reverse Recall on Amazon: amzn.to/2nVUfqd Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart 00:00 Intro 00:59 Why "Koine" is pronounced differently in English from Modern Greek 01:56 Why learning vowel length is mandatory 04:02 Classical Attic Vowels 12:38 Good News, Bad News 14:32 Vowels regularly long 32:13 The main tools you'll need 39:53 Let's macronize some text! (Xenophon, Ephodion 2) 1:10:11 Conclusion

[@sirsherguioth4573]

This video comes at just the perfect time, I started learning ancient Greek using your pronunciation guides, readings, etc. and I bought the book Logos and that one doesn't have macrons. Thank you very much Luke, you are the best.

[@Seventh7Art]

Classical Sanskrit and Standard Japanese are also moraic languages, like ancient Greek and classical Latin.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Absolutely.

[@revilo178]

As well as Vedic Sanskrit ;) You can't read the Rigveda without morae.

[@Urdatorn]

As is Thai! 🇹🇭

[@kori228]

@@Urdatorndoes Thai mora influence poetry? I'm aware it has vowel length, but since it's also fully tonal I would assume it doesn't come into play beyond checked vs non-checked syllables.

[@GnosticInformant]

such a musical language... I love greek.

[@jiotis81]

and the free thinking Greeks loves your channel also!!!

[@Brandon55638]

Absolutely. Especially the Attic dialect of Ancient Greek.

[@jiotis81]

Would you please be the director of the Greek education system?? I have learned more things through your videos that i learned in 16 years of Greek schools and Universities... Thank you so much!!!

[@woutercaes5118]

Χαῖρε, ῶ Λούκιε! Very interesting video! I wonder if and how the Ancient Greeks indicated phonemic vowel length and pitch accent in their writing. I think the accents were introduced around 200 BC, but according to some sources they weren't commonly used until after 600 AD. So how did Byzantine scribes know where to place the accent marks if they only had stress accent? Or were they simply used often enough in antiquity to pass the knowledge down? And were macrons or apices ever used in antiquity in Ancient Greek, like in Latin? Or do we only know the vowel lengths from poetry and etymology? Otherwise I fully agree that we should use macrons and accents in our modern texts because they were literally designed to help foreigners pronounce the language correctly, though I wonder sometimes what the point of smooth breathings is. I also had a question about the word στία. Wiktionary gives the alpha in the nominative and accusative singular as short, but long in the other cases. Is this just an exception, because I would expect ἡ στίᾱ. Thanks for all your helpful videos!

[@revilo178]

To be fair, I think it's understandable why LSJ doesn't want to put both a macron and an accent above the same letter. In the 1800 they may not have had small enough diacritics (I'm speculating here) but more importantly, most people would need a magnifying glass to see them clearly.

[@pablovargasvergara5526]

1:01:36 Luke: isn't this fun? are you having fun? this is how I have fun... me too Luke, me too. keep it up!

[@pierreabbat6157]

Some months ago I found out in Wiktionary that φρέαρ (a ρ/τ noun (reflex of PIE r/n noun) still in Modern Greek) has a long α which is completely unobvious from the spelling. Some words in Wiktionary are written with an acute accent and macron together, or a macron and a breve together, which I find hard to read. Τύλη (thankfully they did not try to write all three diacritics together) can have long or short υ, so Tylopoda, though it's certainly accented on the first o, can have the y long or short.

[@zino4030]

I just watched your video on the Robert-ranieri method. This is perfect.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Great timing!

[@Urdatorn]

Good timing! I’m working on a macronizer for AG as my master thesis 😊 Soon you won’t have to go through this, if you don’t want to ✌️

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Wow! Sounds great, please keep me informed. When it’s done, send it to the channel business email.

[@BenjaminBruce7]

I'd like updates on this too please!

[@Samuel-pq6bt]

I'd like this too!

[@chancylvania]

Oh good a video on long vowels in Greek. I’ve been having a hard time figuring that out

[@chancylvania]

Oh…so pvl is completely inconsistent…ugghh

[@SpareAccount-jc8kb]

Could you make a video on Ancient Greek elision?

[@asg32000]

Yes!!! I've been waiting for this!

[@j.2047]

Awesome class for free, thank you so much!

[@StergiosMekras]

Some of that remains in modern Greek as well, but it's more subtle (to the point where you can forget it's there).

[@nartha]

It's always annoying when I'm writing hexameter and the dictionary refuses to tell me the length of the vowel. Sometimes I find it in its compounds and sometimes it takes me a couple of minutes of searching. I wish all textbooks included the macra. The one I used (Shelmardine) did it for inflections but it was inconsistent for the other vocab, which means that I sometimes remember lengths in the stem, just not as often as I would like to.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

That’s true, it is a bit of a struggle. But I think it’s worthwhile

[@jasonbaker2370]

You seem to never run out of great ideas for videos, Luke. Very helpful and fascinating. Thanks! ❤

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I hope that shall be so! Thanks, my man

[@user-sc5iv2rp2t]

Who else thinks that the creator would have served as a secretary under Ptolemy Soter.

[@iberius9937]

Good analogy with understanding Old English through its phonemic vowel length, given most texts that are not didactic omit macrons.

[@Osz6]

I LOVE your videos

[@iberius9937]

Watching, now! Killer shirt, sir!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks, bro!

[@luchosab1]

To your excellent explanation I would like to add a little example: βασιλεία (kingdom) has the final A long, like φιλοσοφία, ἐκκλησία, and so on. Instead, βασίλεια (queen) has the final A short, like μαθήτρια. The length of the vowel also gives you a clue to remember the meaning of both words, so you can translate them properly. When it is short, it is the feminine equivalent of βασιλεύς; when it is long, it means the institution.

[@watching7650]

Not a relevant example: one is oxytone while the other one is paroxytone. How can one ignore that essential difference?

[@luchosab1]

Relevant for what? I didn't intend to give a relevant example. Just to mention that the vowel quantity, which is shown clearly by the accent, as you figured out (one is proparoxytone and the other is paroxytone), gives a clue to remember the meaning. The proparoxytone is the feminine of 'king', the other the institution. No intention to give a "relevant" example, so I don't understand your irrelevant complain.

[@watching7650]

​@@luchosab1 Relevant in the sense that vowel quantity is not necesarily the recognition parameter in your example. Stress makes the word recognizable. Stress is a real phenomenon, while accent is a means to represent stress, invented very late, and intended to indicate *to foreigners* where to place the stress and the type/quality of it, while quantities are a secondary phenomenon conditioned on stress. Anglophones' bickering about the supposed character ofd stress in history and their avoidance of the word "stress" does not change the fact.

[@donutman6941]

@@watching7650 But as @luchosab1 has correctly stated, βασιλείᾱ (kingdom) has a long A whereas βασίλειᾰ has a short A. The accent placement helps distinguish this as many nouns possess this "recessive accent" that is being pulled back by a long ultima in the case of βασιλείᾱ. Compare this to θάλαττᾰ --> paroxyton accent lets us know that the final A is short. In other instances such as γλῶττᾰ, the existence of the circumflex clears up this disambiguation. Whether you read the Greek with a pitch accent or stress accent won't make a difference as both audibly and visually the accent placement will be noticed.

[@LeoStaley]

God this would have been so wonderful for me to have 15 years ago in first two semesters I was struggling my way through Hansen and Quinn

[@zeggwaghismail827]

Hello Luke, I really appreciate all the videos about pronunciation and macronization. But I was wondering how all this was established by the researchers : how do we know precisely how Cicero sounded like ? Is it that reliable and trustworthy..?

[@brian2007tube]

A great video as always but I was left confused by one thing: at 13.41 you say the meaning of the word is affected by vowel length (for vowels a,i,u) (like in Latin)? Can you give an example please? Totally get why it affects the sound of greek, esp. in poetry, but in what words would we need the macron to know the meaning of the word?

[@daviydviljoen9318]

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon has macrons... I think, it certainly looks like it does. (Most people think German is hard, but they have no idea how hard Ancient Greek is, because at least in German you won't accidentally say that you see squirrels or something!)

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Thanks for the tip! Haha, as for squirrels, you *will* here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jZSZlqGOlLyia80si=KT4okMnrlfBHSF_S

[@daviydviljoen9318]

@@polyMATHY_Luke I'll check that out, it will definitely help with pronunciation. Though, my Greek is nowhere near good enough for actually comprehending that. I've only been learning a few weeks...

[@RiccardoRadici]

Hi, Luke! Very useful video. I was not aware of the rule you explain at minute 15:15 (and again at 34:00). It isn't even to be found in (most) grammars. That's very good to know! By "right before this final α", you mean "on a vowel which immediately precedes α", right? In theory, "right before" could also mean "on the syllable right before the final α", but this cannot be the case, because there are words like δόξᾰ. All of this makes me remember a time when I was trying to figure out vowel lengths in Greek place names. I was writing the Italian versions of the names (as usual in Italy, e.g. Mileto for Mī́lētos, Bisanzio for Bȳzántion). For the sake of care, I was also indicating the correct Italian (= Latin) accents. I had difficulties with names such as Ἄργιλος, Ἀρτάκη, Βάργασα, Βέρυτις, Βύσβικος, Ἴδυμα, Μάδυτος, etc. (and in theory also with Βαργύλια, Ναξία, etc., because Greek is not Latin, and I couldn't be 100% sure that those iotas were short, could I?). Wiktionary indicates some of those vowels as short, but can it be trusted, even if it doesn't provide any source? At the end, I considered all those penultimate syllables short, just guessing (I also considered 1) that in the Ionic dialect long alphas usually become etas, and 2) the "Σωτῆρα Law", which however has divergent formulations in different grammar books*, and at least in the Attic dialect is limited by Vendryes' Law). *Pieraccioni and Cardinale write: "A Greek word ending in a trochee (- ∪) is always properispomene (they're confusing long vowels with long syllables, but that's another problem). Others (such as Restifo-Neto and Wikipedia) restrict the rule to this: "If the accent comes on the penultimate syllable, it must be a circumflex if the last two vowels of the word are long-short." However, I think they only use this restrictive formulation because of Vendryes' Law, which is probably the only exception to the first formulation. Unfortunately, Vendryes' Law could apply to all the proparoxytone place names I mentioned. 😡 By the way, don't you access Facebook anymore?

[@SkynetVortex]

Can you make a video about the Enochian language?

[@ronaldovalete31]

Great vídeo! How do you type the macron together with the acute accent?

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I use the Sophokeys keyboard on Mac, and Hoplite on iPhone.

[@iberius9937]

First time I've seen anyone have a "panic attack" over whether or not a vowel is pronounced long in Greek! I wish most people were half as dedicated as yourself! 😂

[@fariesz6786]

how to make Luke angry: ε̃

[@uppsalarembra]

Nice video, Luke! But I'll need to watch it again and do practice on my own. Other than that, I would like to make a suggestion for a future video. It is a topic I personally find REALLY interesting and intriguing: the Pre-Greek substrate and Pre-Greek languages. If you have anything to say upon this, you'd give me a better kickstart, as you've done other times before and to be honest I learn better from videos. I have already read Beekes' book (with "Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon" in the title), but I found it confusing, maybe he took some (important) things as granted and went onward before I realized it. Nonetheless, take it into consideration, see if you have the time and if others want it... yet, I am not sure if you would like to, or have the knowledge upon it. Please let me know if you are open to the idea, just for my own information. Thank you for your time!

[@AthrihosPithekos]

Beekes baptised everything he could not explain Pre-Greek and moved on.

[@juanpablo-rdm]

Γραζζιε μιλλε, Λυουκ 😉

[@iberius9937]

1:01:37-1:01:39 Same here, lol. Sometimes I'll spend a whole hour, maybe more than an hour, on something like this.

[@letusplay2296]

Seems a little bit similar to my learning of modern Persian which doesn't include vowel markings, which I then have to put in myself for my study materials. Tiresome but necessary to reach fluency. Also probably not as difficult because there is always the option of just asking a native speaker in my case. Good luck!

[@davidross2004]

I have some knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic from university. I am fully aware that Arabic and Persian are two very different languages from two entirely different language families: Arabic being Afro-Asiatic and Persian being Indo-European; however, I am curious: does Farsi use harakat--the Arabic symbols used to indicate short vowels--to indicate, well, short vowels?

[@letusplay2296]

@@davidross2004 it's not particularly common to see, but yes. The most common harakat is اً and as far as I know it's only used for adverbs loaned from Arabic like معمولاً. You'll see them used in dictionaries, but Romanisation is common as well, at least online. In books they're sometimes used, for clarity because there are a couple of words that are spelled the same but with different vowels that mean different things.

[@DemetriosKongas]

Excellent stuff! You brought back memories of the old high school days! Daughter is θυγάτηρ. You placed the accent on the last syllable.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I mentioned the Errata including θυγάτηρ in the pinned comment

[@koimismenoss]

👍

[@matthewheald8964]

To anyone who has an answer, did Ancient Greek orthography use any kind of macron? I know that spaces & punctuation (with the exception of, presumably, pitch accent markers) weren’t invented yet, but I’m a bit unclear on whether or not macrons were at that time. I tend to be a bit more traditionalist when it comes to ancient orthography. Multās grātiās tē agō Lūcī!

[@nazarbayev3169]

Not normally. In some poetic texts macron and breve would be used to indicate syllable lengths for the purposes of meter, but it wouldn't differentiate between a syllable that's long because it has a long vowel, final consonant or both. Even the usual system of pitch, rough, and smooth breathing diacritics weren't around in classical Athens but were innovated by Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 BC, although other ways to write the consonant H had been around for much longer. Even so, it seems useful for learners in the same way you'd never mark stress normally when writing English but a second language learner might want to know.

[@matthewheald8964]

@@nazarbayev3169oh I definitely agree that modern conventions of punctuation, diacritics, case sensitivity, etc. can be useful in low to mid level learning materials; my reasoning is that if at some point you don’t learn how to read Ancient Greek the way Ancient Greeks wrote it (e.g. ΕΝΑΡΧΗΗΝΟΛΟΓΟΣ, or something like that for John 1:1) then you haven’t fully arrived at an understanding of the Greek language and are interacting with it through a filter, just like the English learner who learns to read the sentence “The boy gave a ball to his dog” with a phonetic transcription such as “thuh boi gayv uh bawl too hiz dawg” would in one sense be interacting with English, but in another not at all. And in both cases, each student’s knowledge of their respective target languages would be rendered completely useless if they happened to stumble upon any real text written in said language.

[@nazarbayev3169]

@@matthewheald8964 True, although if a person's just interested in reading the classics in polytonic orthography they can probably get away with that. I'd imagine most people would want to try reading inscriptions and early texts as well, and beyond just not having tones you have epichoric alphabets and so on to contend with (Linear B? Sounds fun!) As an aside, your phonetic example reminds me of pictures of ostracons, since apparently the Athenian citizenry couldn't decide whether to spell Θεμιστοκλῆς Νεοκλέους as ⦶ΕΜΙZ⦶ΟΚ𐌋Ε𐌔 ИΕΟΚ𐌋Ε𐌔 or ☉ΕΜΙ𐌔☉ΟΚ𐌋Ε𐌔ΜΕΟΚ𐌋ΕΟ𐌔 or ⴲΕΜΙ𐌔ⴲΟΚ𐌋ΕΕ𐌔 ΝΕΟΚ𐌋ΕΟ𐌔 (could that be vowel length or just another mistake? If you could even call it a mistake at that point in time.)

[@IonutPaun-lp2zq]

What about long vowels in Latin ? How would you macronise the latin texts?

[@brian2007tube]

as I understand it, it is much more common for Latin text to show long vowels with a macron (e.g. ō) - this is because the semantic meaning of latin words can be affected by vowel length (e.g. mālum 'apple' / malum 'bad'). I did not think that any greek words are distinguished only by vowel length and have posted a question to Luke above to clarify this.

[@imfar2busybeingdelic]

Τον θέλω για καθηγητή στο σχολείο

[@watching7650]

Καλά το λες. Είναι τέλειο το σύστημά του για άτομα που ήδη ξέρουν τα ελληνικά. Για ξένους όμως, το ν'αρχίσουν τα ελληνικά με κάποια αρχαία προφορά τους κόβει από τη ζωντανή γλώσσα.

[@theatisgr]

Does the verb "macronize" have anything to do with French president Macron? 🤔

[@Flugs0]

how do you write greek so quickly?

[@Stormageddon571]

10:00 what about οι?

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Hi there, I may not understand your question; οι is a diphthong; all the letters and digraphs in the chart are long and short monophthong vowels.

[@Stormageddon571]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Oh, In the pronunciation scheme I'm learning (200 AD), that's pronounced as a monophthong, but I guess that was a diphthong in 403 BC.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

It was indeed. And it was probably still a diphthong for most speakers in 200 AD; see the Variants of Lucian Pronunciation video.

[@luchosab1]

Great video, Luke. The criteria many authors use to not include the macrons is just the fact that they try to reach more people. I think these criteria are related to the goals we have when we learn or teach a language, and how many people teachers would like to reach. It also has to be with the quality of the education in our respective countries. As a professor in an university from Argentina, students don't care at all about many details you mention here (when I say "at all", it is "AT ALL", pronounced like Jack Nicholson in "The Shining"). I say this despite the love for Greek I have and the obsessive I am. Unless we want to speak or read REALLY properly and to understand thoroughly the morphology of the language, these are just details. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember some fundamental issues about vowel quantity because not only is it part of the essence of the language, but also crucial to write accents properly, to decline or conjugate words, and to read ancient poetry. Recently I received an e-mail from the author of Logos, who is a friend of mine, and he asked me if he should include the macrons in his 3rd edition. My answer was: "as an obsessive freak, I'd say: do it (like Palpatine); as a professor who tries to reach the most people we can, I'd say: let's include them after they know the basics". Not many people are crazy as we are haha.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Hi, thanks for the comment. While I don't know the author of Logos personally, he was very gracious when I sent the edits I made to the first edition, and many of those corrections were included in the second edition that is currently available. You write, "The criteria many authors use to not include the macrons is just the fact that they try to reach more people." While an interesting criterion, I do not follow: a macron, just like different types of accent marks or the iota-subscripts, are easly ignored or simplified as desired by the professor or individual. Are you suggesting that the presence of macrons creates an obstacle any more than an iota-subscript? You write, "Unless we want to speak or read REALLY properly and to understand thoroughly the morphology of the language, these are just details." Unfortunately, that is not the case. To say that phonemic vowel length is 'just a detail' of Ancient Greek, and therefore subject to dismissal, is to say that stress accent in English or Spanish is 'just a detail' and may be disregarded. Can you imagine a textbook that teaches Spanish as a second language without any written accent marks? Or incorrect accent placement? Can you imagine someone reading some piece of English literature and having any hope of appreciating it if every other stress accent was placed on the wrong syllable? English and Spanish have words that are fundamentally built around lexical stress. Ancient Greek words are fundamentally built on the mora-units of duration. One may certainly teach Ancient Greek in any pronunciation they wish, but there does not exist Ancient Greek as an entity without phonemic vowel length, whether a part of the professor's pronunciation or not. Thus this cannot be dimissed part of the "details." You write, "My answer was: "as an obsessive freak, I'd say: do it (like Palpatine); as a professor who tries to reach the most people we can, I'd say: let's include them after they know the basics". Not many people are crazy as we are haha." I appreciate your sharing this. However, you have given the opposite of the adivce needed "to reach the most people we can." In the past month alone I have received hundreds of emails, comments, and messages from teachers and students alike who had wanted to buy Logos, but knowing that it does not have the macrons, will absolutely not purchase it. Thus this is a matter of sales for Cultura Clásica: I would implore you humbly to give Santiago the advice that his wonderful book is not reaching the widest audience precisely because of the choice not to include macrons. You say, "Let's include them after they know the basics." There is no more basic or fundamental aspect to the Ancient Greek language than phonemic vowel length. Their knowledge is mandatory from day one.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

@@polyMATHY_Luke I’ll add that as a learner, I *hate* it when textbooks’ authors decide to leave information out because they consider it too scary for less motivated students. I don’t care that other people might find this added value unimportant. If I buy a textbook, I want it to be as comprehensive and accurate as realistically possible - and printing the macrons isn’t an impossible task with Unicode and proper fonts these days. It doesn’t even require more space for the text. In a similar way I absolutely hate all language teaching materials that avoid IPA transcriptions like fire, instead using some weird English approximation because “International Phonetic Alphabet looks scary and people won’t learn from it” - well, it’s *really, really* helpful to those who are willing to learn it, and English approximation more often than not is more misleading than helpful.

[@luchosab1]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks for your answer! I think there is a little misunderstanding with what I said. As I wrote before, vowel length is essential to understand not only the essence of language, but also to determine how to write accents and read poetry properly. I would never put in doubt the role of vowel length. I teach it from day one when I explain vowels, because I think the same as you. And it would be silly to think different about that point. However, I think we have to separate people who learn Ancient Greek in two groups: one that wants to learn Ancient Greek and one that HAS to learn Ancient Greek. I think this is important, because some people don't learn Ancient Greek by pleasure. Of course, some people learn it by pleasure AND by means of school or university. But it's not the case many times. I teach in an university (I'm talking about my experience, so I'm not claiming it to be a tendency) where most people don't like Ancient Greek, despite the constant efforts we make (and despite, of course, the recommendation of your KZbin channel :) ). They just want to pass the exams. And unfortunately most students in my city at least arrive here without knowing anything of grammar. It is a big effort to them even to learn the alphabet and to read letters, so adding macrons or teaching, for example, the difference of length between λύω and λέλυκα... they just don't care. For them, they are details. But, of course, vowel length is absoloutely important, for example, in the 1st declension and in the distinction between neuters and feminine adjectives ending with -α, so I'm not questioning that. It is not only an essential characteristic of the language, but also a good paedagogical way to make students learn differences in case, number, gender... People from every part of the world who write to you and who are in contact with you and many more teachers are people who find in Ancient Greek something more than an obstacle to pass through. That's what I'm saying. So when I (and Santiago) say: "we try to reach more people", of course we are not referring to people who want to learn Ancient Greek, but to people who have to and, after the exams, they don't want to deepen. So, although your claims are true, I think we have to look closer at people who have to learn Ancient Greek. Maybe it is part of a greater debate about the education system, the ways we teach (and I think you make a great, great contribution in this issue) and the practice of pronunciation (another issue in which you make an enormous contribution), which unfortunately is not put in question here in my country, because of many prejudices. Maybe I'm wrong, but I teach Greek since 2007 and that's what the experience tells me. At least in the first levels we should teach the basics (vowel length is part of the basics), the changes in the accentuation because of vowel length, and so on. Nevertheless, I'll take into account what you said, and I'll make Santi know your opinion, which I appreciate the most. Greetings from Argentina!

[@jonathanthegreat2008]

Some of these “circumflexes” looks like tildes! What gives?! I love you! From isræl! Love your language videos! ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤!

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Glad you liked the video. The circumflex accent can look different in various fonts. It may look like ~ or ˆ

[@jonathanthegreat2008]

@@polyMATHY_Luke grātias, L. Ranieri! salvete ab Isræl 🇮🇱

[@asimpleuser123]

You should attend a Traditional Latin Mass

[@shinzon0]

Why do you say >>approx

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

I explain in the other videos I cited. That’s when the orthography we still use was established by Euclid the Archon.

[@shinzon0]

@@polyMATHY_Luke Ah, Danke 😁

[@benmoi3390]

so πεφυκα's long "υ" could be written with an underwritten iota... but that tradition of iota souscrit didn't existed at that time.

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Hi, thanks for the comment. No, that's not what's going on; iota-subscript stands for what was written next to the iota ("adscript") in Classical Attic spelling: ᾄδει, αὐτῇ, τούτῳ with adscripts are written ἄ̄ιδει, αὐτῆι, τούτωι, and they are long diphthongs, pronounced /aːi̯/ /ɛːi̯/ /ɔːi̯/. But in the word πέφῡκα, we have a phonemically long vowel ῡ, long by nature, and not a diphthong, pronounced /yː/. It would have nothing to do with an iota-subscript. I hope that clarifies it.

[@conlangknow8787]

How i describe myself: 17:40

[@user-li5uh9cn4l]

Gay

[@Ukitsu2]

Isn't Emmanuel Macron busy enough with the whole 'troops on the ground" and "European Union Army" to be involved with Ancient Greek vowels? jk Nice video, thanks

[@simplicius1770]

the macron should also be traced in verbs in the imperfect tense beginning on the mentioned vowels as for example in ῑ̔́στην

[@polyMATHY_Luke]

Most definitely.

[@firstaidsack]

Another very helpful website I found while macronizing Logos is en-academic (can't post a link).