Development of Greek part 2

Barbour, Ruth.  Greek Literary Hands: A.D. 400-1600.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

Part 2

In the second part of her book, Barbour talks about the development of letter forms, the use of diacritics, and the use of guides.  She claims that the beginnings of these changes are hard to date because many of the manuscripts themselves are difficult to date.  Many of these different ways to write letters and represent diacritic marks also tend to coexist, even in within the same manuscript.  The shape of words tended to remain fairly similar, and only varied slightly.  The biggest example is the eta (η).  This sometimes had an extended neck and shortened legs, so it looked more like our “h” than a typical eta.

Greek used to be a tonal language (not in quite the same sense as Chinese), and these tones were marked for each word by the Hellenistic period.  The Greeks had three different tonal markings:   ︠,  ︡  ,  and   ︢.  These represented a rising voice, a falling voice, and a circumflex voice.  These are not pronounced as tones in modern times, instead they are pronounced as accents.  Historians are unsure as to whether these tones were pronounced as tones or accent marks during the Byzantine era.  In modern times these tonal markings (also called diacritics) are usually referred to as accent marks.  Historians also use that term to describe those same markings in the Byzantine, Hellenistic, and Classical eras of Greek writing because they are unsure as to when they switched from being tonal to accentual.  This is probably a form of diglossia.

Greek words also have another distinguishing feature called breathing marks.  The Greek language does not actually have a letter for the /h/ sound.  Instead, if a word begins with an /h/ sound (or a rolling /r/) then a ( is written above the first vowel (this only applies to words that actually begin with a vowel, as no self-respecting Greek would put an /h/ sound in front of a consonant).  If a word does not begin with an /h/ sound then a ) is added over the initial vowel.  These marks over words beginning with vowels, called closed and open breathing marks respectively, made it so Greek scribes saw little need in separating words.  The breathing marks seemed, at least to them, to sort out the words that would be difficult to tell apart anyways.  The breathing marks were also sometimes marked with └ ┘instead of rounded marks.  These square marks tend to be from earlier manuscripts from before 900, but they also continued to exist along with the rounded marks well into the thirteenth century.  They were even used together in the same manuscript.

Thisisapainforforeign,modernstudentstoread,butforthemitwasnotverydifficultastheyknewthelanguage.  Luckily, for the modern reader, the scribes used punctuation marks to show the ends of sentences (marked by a floating “.”) and questions (marked by a semicolon).  In miniscule scripts important words such as nouns and verbs often began with an uncial form of the letter.  Words ending in a sigma or an alpha also often changed these letters to their uncial form.  This further helped readers to distinguish between words.  When division did occur they were usually to make the page seem symmetrical and often did not break between words, but in their middle.

Greek scribes used guidelines in formal manuscripts to keep the text straight.   Uncial, and the first miniscule stood on top of the guidelines much like we write today.  Eventually the scribes changed their writing styles.  Historians are not entirely sure when this change occurred, because like everything else in Byzantine writing, these styles coexisted for most of the Byzantine era.  These different styles of guides including hanging the letters below a line or of the lines passing through the middle of the letters.  Multiple guide styles were often used within the same manuscript, especially if it seemed that it changed scribes.