From W. B. Stanford’s The Sound of Greek: Studies in the Greek Theory and Practice of Euphony (University of California Press, 1967), via Laudator Temporis Acti:
In our world of printed books we mostly study and enjoy literature in silence. We do sometimes hear the sound of poetry and of good prose in the classroom and in the theatre, and when we listen to the radio. But most of our literary experience, as adults at any rate, is silent. We sit in a library or at home; our eyes move quickly over black marks on a white page; and our mind takes in an author’s thoughts and images. When we were children at school, our teachers taught us to aim at rapid reading: the sooner we got through the elementary stage of sounding the words as we went along, the better, they said. In any educational book on the psychology of reading you will probably find a section called something like “Training to Decrease Vocalization.”¹
We take all this for granted, and undoubtedly we gain great benefits from this silent, rapid reading. So when we are studying the classical literatures of Greece and Rome we generally aim at reading them in just the same way. We use our eyes, but not our ears and our voices.² We are what has been aptly called “eye-philologists,” not “ear-philologists.”³
¹ See, e.g., John Anthony O’Brien, Silent Reading (New York, 1921).
² Cf. A.W. Verrall, The Bacchants of Euripides and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1910) 246: “The habit of silent reading has made us slow to catch the sound of what is written. And moreover, used to language and poetry constructed on principles not merely different from the Greek, but diametrically opposed, our attention, even if given to the sound, brings us no natural and instinctive report. To logic, rhetoric, pathos we are alive; and upon these heads the tragic poets are criticised; but as to noise we will not notice it, not even if we are bidden and bidden again.”
³ I take the terms “eye-philologists” and “ear-philologists” from [Otto] Jespersen [Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin] 23 f. How little the ear counts among modern rhetoricians is exemplified in the neglect of all matters of verbal sound except rhythm in so full a manual as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric (New York, 1949).
This continues to astonish me, though it’s not the first time it’s been brought to my attention. Subvocalizing is so ingrained in me it’s hard to imagine reading without it, and impossible to imagine someone thinking they could appreciate poetry (of all things) without on some level hearing the sound of it (for which it exists, or existed until modern experimental verse). It took me years of concentrated effort to develop the ability to hear the meters of Greek and Latin verse, but once I did I could instantly tell how a line of verse worked and detect if it was off. I pity people who deal professionally with it and yet have to laboriously count the morae or whatever it is they do instead of using the senses they were born with and that poets depend on. “Training to Decrease Vocalization” forsooth!
Gerard Manley Hopkins has always struck me as a poet who makes you mentally read his poetry as though you were reading it aloud. Take these lines:
“Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all;….”
The addition of “and all”, sounding so conversational, forces you to read it as though it were spoken. The awkwardness of some of his other lines has a similar effect.
That this was written so long ago that a 1949 textbook by Brooks & Warren can be referenced in a footnote as if representing the state of current scholarship is a minor delight, even if the phenomenon decried has not improved since 1967. We were, however, definitely encouraged to read Homer out loud to try to feel the meter when I were a lad in the spring of ’86. (It was the following autumn that I was introduced at a cocktail party to the aforementioned Prof. Brooks, who was by then I believe 80 years old to my 21. I endeavored to make small talk with him about John Crowe Ransom without getting very far.)
Ah, for the days of making small talk about John Crowe Ransom! The ’80s was probably the last time when that was possible.
There was between us a certain asymmetry of knowledge on the topic even for small-talk purposes, since Brooks had personally been a student and disciple of Ransom’s whereas I was simply in the <1% of Americans my age who was actually aware Ransom had existed and had read a few poems by him — in my case because I had somewhat obsessively read and reread my father's old copy from his own college days of A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry (edited by the now-obscure Oscar Williams*) — but knew no more of him than that.
*Williams apparently emigrated to the U.S. as a seven-year-old boy back when Teddy Roosevelt was still in the White House, but had been born Oscar Kaplan in one of the bits of Eastern Europe that saw quite a lot of violence-driven shifts in ethnic demography over the following half-century. That shtetl, however, ended up on the Soviet side of the Polish-Soviet border when it stabilized for a while circa 1922.
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry
I was going to say “I have that!” but when I checked it turned out I was thinking of A Pocket Book of Modern Verse. Dude edited a lot of books.
It would not surprise me if there were some overlap in contents between the “Pocket Book” and the “Little Treasury” such that if you bought both you had paid for certain poems twice. Don’t know if Ransom (or any specific Ransom poem) was within the overlap.
I had most of Oscar Williams anthologies. He was blamed for including too many of his wife’s poems. He included a fair proportion of radical, populist, and non-modernist poems, which I say was a good thing. I introduced myself to modern poetry using his anthologies and also Selden Rodman’s.
He never included T S Eliot’s poems. His story is that Eliot refused to allow his poems to be published in cheap paperbacks. When Penguin started publishing classics in cheap editions ca. 1948, the very idea was controversial, both for business reasons and cultural reasons. His Odyssey sold very very well, ending that controversy, but there were still many who did not think that the unwashed masses should be reading classics. I found a number of cheap classics in the rack at my local drugstore, including a selected Montaigne which I still own.
Ivan Illych gave enormous importance to the difference brought by silent reading, which he credits to St. Augustine.
I like Illych better than almost anybody, but am willing to admit that he is pretty far out there.
https://epochemagazine.org/26/how-silent-reading-gave-birth-to-the-modern-subject/
Poetry, yes, because is all about the sound, unless there is some genre I’m not thinking about.
Reading foreign languages I’m trying to learn, that too.
Reading in general, no. It took me a while when I was a kid to shake off speaking aloud in my head what I was reading, because it was distracting and would slow me down.
Yes, I can skim in English, just absorbing the sense, which is useful in certain circumstances, but one thing I like about reading in Russian is that I can’t do that, I automatically (however subvocally and quickly) sound out what I read, which would be a problem if I had to gobble up masses of information but is all to the good when reading literature.
Sound is certainly the most neglected aspect of Greek poetry, but euphony and sound effects are a central part of the artistry of even supposedly “unsophisticated” poets. You could read through whole shelves of modern scholarship on Homer and never get an inkling of the frequency and boldness with which he makes use of assonance, alliteration etc. A few examples from the Iliad:
1.604 Μουσάων θ᾽ αἳ ἄειδον ἀμειβόμεναι ὀπὶ καλῇ “the Muses who sang replying to each other in a sweet voice” (for the vowel/diphthong pattern, here …a-ei-o a-ei-o…, cf. my comment in this 2014 thread)
4.105-6 αὐτίκ᾽ ἐσύλα τόξον ἐΰξοον ἰξάλου αἰγὸς / ἀγρίου “immediately he took out his well-polished bow made from a springing wild ibex” (with the velars echoed a few lines down by…)
4.109 τοῦ κέρα ἐκ κεφαλῆς ἑκκαιδεκάδωρα πεφύκει “from its head the horns grew to a length of sixteen palms” (ekk- ekk- in psilotic Ionic)
4.504 et passim δούπησεν δὲ πεσών “falling he thudded”
4.525 χύντο χαμαὶ χολάδες “his bowels poured onto the ground”
Not exactly a sound effect (beyond the formal parallelism of οἰμωγή-εὐχωλὴ), but a cool chiasmus which brings out the chaos of the battlefield:
4.450-1 ἔνθα δ᾽ ἅμ᾽ οἰμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν / ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων “there were heard together the groaning and the cries of triumph of men killing and being killed”
And though Euripides is admittedly a “sophisticated” poet, it’s easy to miss the breathtakingly dark-sounding vowel and consonant effects in the opening of the Hecuba:
Ἥκω νεκρῶν κευθμῶνα καὶ σκότου πύλας / λιπών, ἵν᾽ Ἅιδης χωρὶς ᾤκισται θεῶν “I come from the vault of the dead and the gates of darkness, where Hades has made his home far from the gods”
The Stanford book sounds like it should have interesting things to say about this stuff — has anyone read it?
This is about not actually reading aloud, right?
I was never taught to not even imagine sounds.
Getting used to the concept of syllable length completely independent from stress, and to the concept that word-final single consonants always belong to the next syllable with no regard for stress or meaning, does take a while if you’re coming from a Germanic language. I still make mistakes related to these things when I try to read Latin verses in verse. And Greek seems to have somewhat different rules that I haven’t figured out: I can’t get most of αὐτίκ᾽ ἐσύλα τόξον ἐΰξοον ἰξάλου αἰγὸς to scan, for starters. Is ξ a syllable onset, so τόξον is a short and a long syllable in isolation and two short syllables in this context? But that doesn’t work for ἰξάλου? And is ου still treated as /ow/, so there’s a syllable boundary through it here?
AU-tik e-SU-LA TOK-son e-UK-so-on IK-salo(u) AI-gos
(ἐσῡ́λᾱ)
Right, with “epic” correption in ἰξάλου. (Scare quotes because there’s some inscriptional evidence that it probably wasn’t really epic, but a feature of at least some types of normal spoken Greek.)
Speaking of Greeks:
Antetokounmpo is his Europeanized name. His Nigerian name is Adetokunbo.
TR: Is there a discernible direct line of poetic practice from these lovely Homerian sound effects to Virgil’s sternitur exanimisque tremēns prōcumbit humī bōs?
I’ll throw in Vincent of Beauvais’ description of hell:
and Bernard of Clairvaux’s, from which that was no doubt cribbed:
Full story back in October: Antetokounmpo.
Ah, I guessed that the υ was long, but not the α…
Now it makes sense. Latin was much less tolerant of hiatus, so it didn’t have an opportunity to import that.
Y: Well, Latin had its own strong tradition of alliteration and related effects (there’s a Wiki article with lots of good examples); of course Virgil knew his Homer, too, but I’m not sure how you would tease out lines of influence. I also haven’t read enough of the Alexandrian epic poets to know what happens in the Greek tradition when the mode is no longer primarily oral.
Antetokounmpo is his Europeanized name. His Nigerian name is Adetokunbo.
Previously on LH. [EDIT: ninja-ed by Lars Mathiesen.]
The linked thread also features some discussion of syllable length independent from stress – though in the context of Modern Czech rather than Ancient Greek.
Epic correption does exist in Latin, but it’s much rarer; e.g. Virgil Eclogues 1.108:
Credimus, an, quĭ amant, ipsi sibi somnia fingunt?
I don’t know if this is an imitation of Greek practice or an extension of the Latin vocalis ante vocalem corripitur rule (or both).
I meant not just the alliteration, but the pure onomatopoeia, like bōs echoing the landing of the stricken bull.
I subvocalise all the time, whatever I’m reading. But when I’m just thinking, I almost never think in words, which sounds a bit self-contradictory, even to me. What about you, Mr hat?
Dunno. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about that, but I’m never sure how it works. I certainly turn a lot of my thoughts into words, but I pretend to no special insight into the process of thought-formation.
Y: Poetry, yes, because is all about the sound, unless there is some genre I’m not thinking about.
There’s a type of modern poetry in which the layout on the page is the important thing. I had to deal with some of that back in the days of typewriters, and it was very tedious going.
I don’t know how you would have a poetry reading for that type of poetry. Maybe you would frame it and hang it on the wall.
I’d love to get an insight on if and how deaf readers interpret poetical meter.
I meant not just the alliteration, but the pure onomatopoeia, like bōs echoing the landing of the stricken bull.
Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. This brought to mind the passage in Iliad 15 where Zeus brags about hurling people down from Olympus (15.22-3 ὃν δὲ λάβοιμι / ῥίπτασκον τεταγὼν ἀπὸ βηλοῦ “whoever I caught I used to seize and throw down from the threshold”), but it turns out that’s less onomatopoeic than I’d remembered. The ὃν δὲ there puts me in mind of Od. 11.598 πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λᾶας ἀναιδής “the shameless stone [of Sisyphus] kept rolling down to the plain”, where it’s more plausibly imitative of the sound of the stone as it rolls.
Not to be confused with Eiffelologists who study Gallic engineering.
Or Ifillologists who study television news.
I, like Y, read poetry aloud or aloud-in-my-head, but not prose. I have real trouble with book-length poetry: it just takes too long to read, especially if not divided into books, cantos, or what have you.
Sophisticated and unsophisticated poets: I know little of the history of Greek poetry, but I would think the unsophisticated poets would be closer to orality and therefore care more, rather than less, about the sound. Perhaps I am thinking about naive and sentimental poetry instead.
Unless unsophisticated just means incompetent, like William McGonagall.
Right, with “epic” correption in ἰξάλου.
In this case, that is historically elision of a short vowel before a word starting in a vowel, as the ending goes back to -e-(h)o-, PIE *-eso. I don’t know whether this was still a sequence of two short vowels when the epic was composed or already a long vowel shortened in accordance with a poetic rules, but I’d assume it was the former.
Oh yes, I’ve read -ου actually scans as -οο in a few places.