[B-Greek] Machen-Modern vs Mounce-Classical

Eric Weiss eweiss at gte.net
Sat Dec 20 12:09:17 EST 2003


I have a chart comparing "Erasmian" vs. "Modern Greek" vs. Randall
Buth's 
"Reconstructed Koine" (Biblical Ulpan) at:
 
http://www.geocities.com/papaweiss1/ntgreek.htm
 
Click on the first two links for the MS Excel Charts for these.
 
Randall Buth pronounces the eta as a long "a" sound to distinguish it
from 
other sounds, though he says, I believe, that it was likely pronounced
as "ee" in 
Koine times.
 
NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE how Greek was pronounced 2,000 years ago, but 
R. Buth Is probably pretty close. He has the credentials and expertise
to know. 
It's similar to modern Greek in some ways, but different enough that if
you buy 
Jonathan Pennington's audio CDs on NT Greek passages (from Mounce's
Graded 
Reader) - due out next month - or his NT Greek Vocabulary CDs - both
ERASMIAN 
PRONUNCIATION - and compare it with Spiros Zodhiates' Modern Greek
Pronunciation 
NT audiotapes and with Buth's Living Koine Greek For Everyone CDs, you
will find 
yourself juggling three different pronunciation schemes in your head. 
 
Greek Orthodox churches us the Modern Greek pronunciation, I understand.
The big 
problems with the modern pronunciation (and somewhat with Buth's) is the
lack of a 
rough breathing sound, which is helpful for distinguishing some words.
The problem 
with Modern Greek is the fact that so many vowels and diphthongs are
pronounced 
as "ee" which makes it very confusing for learning many words like the
plural forms 
hUMEIS and hHMEIS. Eta, iota, omicron-iota, upsilon are all pronounced
"ee." 
 
On his tapes, Zodhiates isn't consistent in pronouncing gamma a "y" or
"gh" - sometimes 
he also uses "g." He also sometimes pronounces omega as long o, and
other times as 
short o. Buth says they were both pronounced the same (whether long or
short) in NT 
times. In Modern Greek, they're both short o sound. 
 
Erasmian does the best at distinguishing different sounds, consonants,
vowels, and 
diphthongs - only eta and epsilon-iota sound the same. But you sound
like a real hick 
if you talk to someone who speaks Greek and use this pronunciation.
 
Let me throw another option into your mix. J. Lyle Story (Regent
University) and his 
father Cullen I.K. Story (who is or was at Princeton Theological
Seminary) developed 
GREEK TO ME, which uses a picture-memory system to aid word and paradigm

memorization. Click on my link for NT Greek Resources for more info
about the series 
and where to get it (if you DO get it, be sure to get the multimedia CD
that goes with it). 
It's not as paradigm or morphology (word formation) intensive or exact
as Mounce, but 
in less time, you cover the same basic material, PLUS you learn twice
the vocabulary - 
i.e., 630 words vs. 320 words or so. I am currently using it with a
class that includes a 
12 year old and a two 15 year-olds at church (I think those are their
ages - all three are 
also home-schooled by their parents using the Gothard materials
primarily), as well as 
several adults. We're halfway through and I think they're doing okay. To
see what they 
are learning, click on my link for the midterm exam I created and gave
this week. GREEK 
TO ME uses the Erasmian pronunciation, both in the book and on the CD.
 
A problem of learning without a teacher who knows Greek is that all
textbooks have 
some errors; I've found some (very minor, usually) in GREEK TO ME that
I've had to 
comment on (and, if not errors, I sometimes suggest different
terminology or explain 
things a little differently. E.g., I use tau, rather than zeta, as one
of the three dental 
consonants. GREEK TO ME uses delta, theta and zeta.). David Alan Black's
LEARN 
TO READ NEW TESTAMENT GREEK Expanded Edition was the book I used when 
learning from Mounce to help explain things that Mounce was confusing to
me about. 
You can use Black's book as a helpful supplementary grammar, and it's
nice and 
small and thin.
 
Hope this helps!
 
- - -
Eric S. Weiss
eweiss at gte.net
 



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