Paul-Nitz wrote:Stephen Hughes wrote:Here is a recording of the Shepherd psalm just read straight through; Psalm 22. There are some weird pauses and widely variable speeds of reading there as I doubted and double checked myself in real time, but perhaps it is good enough as a starting point for improvement.
Stephen. Fabulous recording. After practicing and recording the same, I could listen to yours with better comprehension and pleasure. Your fluency is great. The tiny pauses didn't interfere with the reading, to my ears.
I take it you can just spiel these off. Not me. I practiced the text for about 20 minutes and made this recording of Psalm 22.
I don't spiel them off. I struggle with my mouth, for want of a better way to express it. For example, I see something like τοῦ ἁγίου, understand it as τοῦ ἁγίου, see how it fits the context grammatically, etc. then I say τῶν ἁγίων. Another thing that happens is that in reading, the person is changed - usually to or from the first or third singular. Sometimes the case governed by preposition is clearly genitive and I say it as accusative. The same for cases with some verbs.
What I hear in my head when I am reading with my eyes, is not always what my mouth produces. The faster I read, the more that sort of thing happens.
Phrase by phrase fluency is much easier to achieve in this type of Greek I think. It is not composed sentence by sentence with the balances. You know how people speak Greek really fluently when you are dreaming about people having conversations. That type of naturally expected fluency is what we hope to achieve.
I've probably said it before, but I am trying to follow the naive notion that the brain processes wave-length differentiation the same way, whether the input is visual or aural. I mean that if you wanted to show that in the phrase Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ὑμῶν μὴ ἐκπορευέσθω, the Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς was related to μὴ ἐκπορευέσθω (where the balancing unit is ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ὑμῶν, it would make it easier to recognise, if we coloured them the same. like this perhaps:
- Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ὑμῶν μὴ ἐκπορευέσθω
or in blue as
- Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ὑμῶν μὴ ἐκπορευέσθω
We see that the different components of the sentence are related to each other by the colour (the same wave-length of light), so what I am trying to achieve is to use the same pitch (wave-length of sound) to highlight the relationship between different parts of a sentence. For me at least, that is really taking the struggle for fluency to a new level - I haven't really mastered the differences between the vowels yet. Ultimately, I want to incorporate red-shift, with the phrases on the left of the balancing point being spoken at a slightly higher pitch than its corresponding on on the right of the balance point. In this case that would mean that Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς would be slightly higher pitched (or perhaps spoken more quickly) than the μὴ ἐκπορευέσθω, which is on the other other side of the balancing unit ἐκ τοῦ στόματος ὑμῶν.
For phrase stresses and timing, the easily recognisable unit in the balancing phrase would be the στόμα, with the least relevant parts being the grammatical information τοῦ and -τος, which are incidental with the ἐκ. The ὑμῶν is what personalises the pronominal reference of the -έσθω, so because it serves two functions - to identify who is speaking, and to personalise the 3rd-person imperative, it probably needs to to be read slowly to give a sense of ubiquity to its meaning.
For emphasis too, in the phrase Πᾶς λόγος σαπρὸς, λόγος is the balancing unit - with ornamentation and without needing special emphasis or attention laid on it, while every πᾶς probably has an umf packed into its punch. Being on either sides of the same balancing element, σαπρὸς probably also needs umf.
I'm sure you can picture that in your mind's ear, but getting the mouth to do all that (without playing with the grammar either) is not so easy. As beautiful and meaningful as it is, Psalm 22 in Greek is not Greek, in the sense that it doesn't have any of those complexities of composition or phraseology that characterise the expressiveness. It is just phrase by phrase.
As a general question: Does red have a higher pitch of light than blue or is blue higher than red when we would read it? I have a lot of trouble getting my mind around that.