Less than Greek 101...

Trevor & Julie Peterson 06peterson at cua.edu
Wed Aug 21 19:29:17 EDT 2002


Mike wrote:

> Understanding that Koine Greek is a 'dead' language and
>  that perhaps nothing can be said with certainty - Is there
>  a standard pronunciation system agreed on? If so, which is
>  it?

That depends on what you mean by "agreed on." Do you mean that everyone
agrees on it? That you won't find. Do you mean that some people agree on it?
Any pronuncation system in use, except one that somebody invents
idiosyncratically and never publishes, would qualify for that. I suspect
that the vast majority of NT Greek students use some variation of what's
typically referred to as Erasmian pronunciation. You'll find it described in
just about any first-year grammar.

There are also reconstructed systems that try to approximate pronunciation
in the Attic period and in the Koine period, as well as Modern Greek
pronunciation, which some scholars advocate. Those are probably the four
major approaches, and there are different reasons to favor each. Gignac
summarizes the approaches in his first-year grammar. You should be able to
find materials on Modern Greek without too much trouble on the Internet or
in a decent bookstore. Randall Buth's material at biblicalulpan.org is
probably the best system around that uses reconstructed Koine. (As I said
earlier today in another post, I don't know much about Attic, so I can't
recommend anything for reconstructed Attic, except that I know Gignac
includes it in his comparison.)
>
> Additionally, my grammars suggest that omicron and omega be
>  pronounced as in 'obey and note' respectively. I can't
>  hear any difference between these two thus creating a
>  problem when they show up together - OW. Do I stutter? Ha
>  ha.

Where are you thinking of them showing up together? Most of the instances
that I can think of offhand are in the lexical forms of contract verbs,
which are artificial, in that they never appear in real use. (They're left
uncontracted in the dictionaries so you can see the stem vowel.) But yes, in
a sense you do stutter when you have to pronounce them side-by-side. I'd
prefer to call it a glottal stop, if you're being careful. It's something
like what we do when we say, "Go over there." We probably just lengthen the
sound in most instances, but if you're trying to enunciate, you'll probably
stop the passage of air at the back of your throat momentarily to divide
"go" from "over."

I agree, though--the use of the two different words doesn't seem to show a
difference in sound between omicron and omega. I would say that's a good
thing, because they probably weren't pronounced differently from each other
in the Roman era. But a lot of people try to distinguish the letters by
pronouncing omega like an English long-o (as in "go") and omicron more like
aw in "lawn." This raises a point that I think ought to be made here. A lot
of people choose their pronunciation of Greek for pedagogical reasons--they
try to make sure each letter is pronounced consistently and uniquely, so
that learning the spelling of a word and its sound can be one in the same
act. This is probably the best argument for certain forms of the Erasmian
system. (Some forms are less precise.) I'm not saying this is a bad
motivation, but it does need to be weighed against other factors, like
historical accuracy and naturalness.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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