Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Now you're the one who seems to be posturing.

You say I am wrong about Attic Greek, by which I assume you mean ancient Attic
Greek, and all I have said about ancient Attic Greek is that we can't be
certain what the pronunciation was.

So when you say that I am wrong about it, I take you to mean that you think we
CAN be certain about the way it was pronounced.

And if so, we disagree. So what is irrational about that?

On Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:29:27 -0500, in alt.usage.english you wrote:

Are you looking for a fight, or are you interested in a rational discussion?

Part of the problem with international newsgroups is that people come from
different cultures, and have different experiences, and so sometimes meaning
has to be negotiated, and it is easy to misunderstand something said by
someone from a different culture, who who speaks a different variety of
English. Consider, for example, the confusion, seen recently in this
newsgroup, over the pronunciation of "Gawd".

Greek, like English, has many different varieties, and has changed over time.

Since English is my native language, I can easily recognise different
varieties, or at least I can fairly quickly tell when someone is speaking in a
dialiect different from my own. Non-native speakers find it more difficult to
identify different dialects and varieties of English.

Greek is not my native language, and I only have a smattering of Greek, so I
find it difficult to identify different varieties. They are literally all
Greek to me. When I say that I am not "posturing", as you put it, but just
pointing out the limitations of my knowledge.

There is Greek Greek (GrG) and there is Cypriot Greek (CpG) and there is
possibly Alexandrian Greek (AlG). A native speaker of any of them could tell
that someone was speaking one of the others, but I can't.

I have been to Greece, and visited Attica, and, briefly, Epirus and
Thesaloniki. From that, and from books, and from language learning tapes, I
have a rough idea of how Greek is pronounced by native speakers.

When native speakers of Greek read texts from any period, they use the same
pronunciation in all cases. They will say that they have difficulty in reading
"ancient Greek", by which they mean anything written before about the 18th
century, because it uses unfamiliar words and sometimes unfamiliar grammatical
constructions. I wouldn't know, because, as I said, it's not my native
language and "it's all Greek to me".

There are a few instances where I can recognise changes, which I have
mentioned elsewhere in this thread, in words for house, bread, fish and so on.
I know that in koine Greek the word for house was "oikia", while in Homeric
Greek it was slightly different, and today the word "spiti" is more common.
But if the text doesn't contain any of the few words where I recognise the
changes, I wouldn't know which period it comes from. Give me a passage from
Homer and a report from the daily newspaper, and I'd find it equally difficult
to read. I might recognise the latter as more recent because in modern written
Greek the accents have been reduced, and, again as someone else has pointed
out, the "rough breathing" has been dropped, though these are fairly recent
changes in orthography. The "rough breathing" was dropped from the written
language because it had disappeared from the spoken language a long time
before. Also, in most printed editions of Homer the text has been modernised
so that it would be unrecognisable to Homer's contemporaries, who almost
certainly wrote in majuscule, and I'm not sure if they had accents either.

In English it is different. I can easily tell the difference between a passage
from Chaucer, a passage from Malory, and a passage from yesterday's newspaper.
I find the older texts more difficult to read, and, especially in the case of
Chaucer, easier to misunderstand, not just because words and spelling are
different, but because the culture was different and the context was so
different. "Beowulf" I can't understand at all.

I have no idea whether I am pronouncing Chaucer the way his contemporaries
would have pronounced it. I read it with my own pronunciation, as Greek
speakers today read Homer, which they probably find as easy or difficult as I
find Chaucer.

Now if you want to call this "posturing", I suppose I'll just have to accept
it as American aggression and intolerance of cultures that differ from their
own. But over the years I've had plenty of rational discussions with you, in
this newsgroup and in others, so why the sudden display of aggression?

In the  UK they don't, but in the UK the beers I'm most likely to see
don't have allergen warnings on. I can't speak for other countries.

They're wheat beers. Which I must also avoid.

I should add that my boss's sister is a very sensitive coeliac, and my
boss's husband a retired master brewer. They both disagree with the
advice about avoiding beer. He says the relevant proteins are
destroyed by the brewing process, she in turn has never had
ill-effects from drinking the stuff. I drink it now and again but have
grown used to cider and perry.

[...]

It's _Weissbier_ / _Weißbier_ or _Weizenbier_.
German < z > is always pronounced "ts."

_Hefeweizen_.

On Jan 24, 12:55 pm, "James Silverton" <not.jim.silver...@verizon.net>
wrote:

Weizens are wheat beers, but the wheat generally only makes up a
portion of the grain bill.  The ones I've brewed (hefe, dunkel, and
kristal weizens) have all had fermentables somewhere in the realm of
50% wheat and 50% barley--I think that's pretty typical but malleable
in either direction.

The improper yeast makes it not actually a hefeweizen by most
standards.  The majority of American beers labelled "hefeweizen" are
not actually hefeweizens by most brewing definitions.  Things like
Pyramid, Widmer Brothers, and UFO "hefeweizens" are properly "American
pale wheat" ales by most guidelines--as are Bell's Oberon, Sam Adams
Summer Wheat, and others that don't use the hefeweizen moniker.

As you note, the are many true hefeweizens brewed in the US--Sierra
Nevada Kellerweis Hefeweizen, Brooklyn Brewery's Brooklyner Weiss, and
Spoetzel's Shiner Hefeweizen are a few of the more widely available
ones.

The same mix-up happens in the area of Belgian whites/witbiers.  There
are some true wits brewed in the US (e.g. Allagash White, Ommengang
White, Celis White) and then there some half-Americanized wits (Blue
Moon being the most prominent example).  The American versions, like
their pseudo-hefeweizen counterparts, tend to have a much stronger
citrus flavor and are sometimes hopped more than usual for the style.

Both wits and weizen are rarely served with a slice of fruit in them,
traditionally; kristalweizens are the exception, with a slice of lemon
being occasionally found even in Germany.  American wheats are very
often served with lemon or (for Blue Moon) orange in them; that's fine
for the American styles, but unfortunately it's gotten a lot of
American bartenders in the habit of putting fruit into a nice Bavarian
hefeweizen or Belgian wit unless I'm careful to specify otherwise
ahead of time.  When your beer has the big banana and clove notes
common to true hefeweizen, a lemon doesn't mesh very agreeably with
the flavor.