spoken koine greek

Richard Maurer rsmaurer at aol.com
Fri Apr 16 09:15:27 EDT 1999


I think you're going to have to triangulate to get to Koine. The best tapes 
I've heard for ancient Greek are by Stephen Daitz of CUNY, whose lifelong 
obsession has been to perform Homer and other classical authors as they 
were performed in 5th century B.C. Athens. *The Pronunciation and Reading 
of Ancient Greek* (2 cassettes, Audio Forum, 800 243-1234) gives his 
methodology along with many examples. Then *A Morphology of New Testament 
Greek* by Brooks and Winbery will tell how pronunciation changed between 
classical and Hellenistic times. My impression is that most of the change 
was in vowels and diphthongs. Modern Greek shows you where all the subtle 
trends have led, but the cumulative change has been quite drastic as 
Daitz's tape demonstrates.

Richard Maurer



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