[B-Greek] Byzantine Text and Pronunciation, Randall Buth
R Yochanan Bitan Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Thu Apr 1 18:33:55 EST 2004
XAIREIN, I have recently resubscribed to the list and in an archive from
Feb I found my name referred as a resource concerning pronunciation and
textual variants related to the Byzantine text family, Koine and Modern
pronunciations.
I can recommend two places to go on this. At
www.biblicalulpan.org under "courses" "greek materials"
at the end is a PDF file
(10 pages) describing and giving a few examples of the massive evidence for
the pronunciation of Koine Greek during the roman period.
To see this at work in the manuscripts, the best place is to pick up the
wonderful volumes of Swanson on the Gospels and Acts where the various
spellings of 45 of the most distinctive manuscripts of the Greek NT are
listed on a line by line comparison and ITACISTIC changes are listed in an
apparatus below the lines of texts. Itacistic changes refers to the tendency
of the language to have vowels collapse into the sound [i]. For the record,
the roman period [say 63 BCE to 325 CE] had the following seven vowel
phonemes and graphic equivalencies:
I=EI
H
E=AI
A
W=O
OU
U=OI
However, around Eusebius' time the HTA rose/had risen into EI=I, and by the
tenth century even among the few educated the OI=U also merged into EI=I=H,
so that a five vowel system was in the minds of scribes from the 9th century
up to modern times:
I=EI=H=OI=U
E=AI
A
W=O
OU
Again, the paper on the website clarifies this and give examples in Greek
script.
For old friends who have seen the above before,
TOIS FILOIS TA ANW HDH IDOUSIN
SXETE YPOMONHN KAI ANEXESQE MOU
ERRWSQE
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Rothberg International School
Hebrew University
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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