[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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