Prosodia Imago Musicae: Punctuation, Accents, and the Earliest Neumes

In the past few decades a number of sources have come to light that seem to represent a kind of intermediate stage: the familiar neumatic notations have not yet developed, but punctuation signs, accent marks, and other symbols are apparently being used to direct auditory aspects of the oral performance of texts, extending beyond their core grammatical functions. Chief among these are manuscripts with Greek texts that were written in Egypt. There are also sources in Coptic and Syriac. Some have been studied and published in isolation, but there has been little comprehensive study of the phenomenon as a whole. Among the principles that would underlie such a study: 1. Many authors of the classical and late antique eras thought about prosody as musical, to the extent that the graphic representation of vocal contour could be called an image or echo of music. 2. In some of our Greek texts, we need to recognize the phenomenon of “homophonous writing.” What modern editors dismiss as erroneous spelling, indicative of a scribe’s limited knowledge of Greek, is nonetheless an inscription of how he thought Greek should sound. We cannot investigate the sonic aspects of the text without respecting his auditory perceptions. 3. Sometimes punctuation and accent marks are in the hand of the original scribe, but often they were supplied by a later hand, part of a reading process rather than the writing process. The distinction between writer’s marks and reader’s marks needs to be kept in mind during the investigation of each individual source. 4. Some scholars, working from a modern perspective, have tried to interpret prosodic signs “vertically,” as representing pitches on a gamut or scale. But they should be read “horizontally,” as elucidating the enunciation of the words, syllable by syllable.