screamadelica wrote:Going great with Pharr... fourteen lessons done and it seems like each is actually getting easier. I've picked up the pace to a lesson a day and the extra momentum is helping.
Momentum is good, but when you find nothing makes sense, slow down and review for a bit.
1) I looked all over and couldn't find this question asked, which is probably because it's so simple and stupid. But: am I correct in understanding that in reciting Homer, one should ignore accents totally and absolutely, emphasizing the ictus and nowhere else?
No, no, no. Remove the word ictus from your vocabulary. It means nothing in Greek meter. According to an older method of reciting this strange disturbance of stress-accent was forced onto hexameters, but it doesn't have anything to do with Greek meter, which is based on patterns of long and short syllables. The accent is completely independent.
I ask because it sounds profoundly hackish in English when people alter the natural stress of a word to make it fit a meter, and I'd imagine it'd sound weird with a non-stress-accent, too.
It would. So it's a good thing it didn't actually happen.
A Practical Approach to the Dactylic Hexameter is a good place to start. I have a PDF explaining how I recite, with links to MP3s of me doing so, Reciting the Heroic Hexameter.
I thought there was a standard version of the text but I guess not; even this early in there are differences that change the meaning pretty substantially even though they scan the same. Do different texts have any meaningful differences, i.e. enough to change the meaning entirely?
There is no such thing as a standard text for any of the Greek classics. Each edition will have small variations based on what the editor thinks is the most likely best reading. I don't think there are any in Homer that utterly change the meaning of a phrase, but sometimes you still get serious meaning differences in the dramatists, or some poets.