[B-Greek] pronouncing vowels

Trevor Peterson 06PETERSON at cua.edu
Mon Dec 8 07:33:13 EST 2003


>===== Original Message From "Blake T. Garretson" <blakeg at metalink.net> =====
>I've been learning Greek out of the Summers/Sawyer grammer, and I have a
>question about the pronunciation of vowels.  Summers says alpha, iota,
>and upsilon may be pronounced either short or long, but he doesn't
>specify WHEN to pronounce them either way.  What is the rule here?

First, I wouldn't worry too much about trying to actually pronounce these 
vowels differently depending on length. If you do, it's probably best to think 
in terms of how long you hold the sound, rather than the kind of distinction 
we normally associate with vowel length in English. Second, I think the thrust 
of Summers's point here relates to accenting. The point is that accent is 
generally related to syllable-length. I'm not going to try to explain the 
accenting rules, since I don't have a very good grasp of them myself. (When I 
learned Greek using Summers, we were told to ignore the accent rules, except 
for comic relief. I keep meaning to go back and learn them--even bought 
Carson's book--but my free time has been limited for the past few years.) But 
as I recall Summers gives a reasonable summary of how accenting works, and you 
should be able to see from his discussions that things like vowel length and 
the presence or absence of a consonant at the end of a syllable are important 
for determining accent placement. So I would say the major point here in 
recognizing that these vowels can be long or short is that when you see them 
in a word, you don't automatically know where the accent goes (because you 
don't know the length of the vowel). That's why you should learn vocabulary 
with the proper accenting.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics




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