[B-Greek] Pronuncing PILATOS

Brent Hudson brent at riveroflifembchurch.com
Fri Aug 13 13:00:57 EDT 2004


Chet's comments highlight the problem of different dialects of English
adding to the confusion about Greek sounds.  In my region of Canada,
"economics" has no "IPA [i]" sound in it.  Using the word "economics" in a
book to illustrate the sound of Greek IWTA would be very confusing to my
students.

I recently purchased a book and CD of Modern Greek.  It was quite
entertaining to read the book and then listen to the native Greek speaker
pronounce the sounds.  For Greek diphthong EI the definition is "i as in
sit".  Listening to the CD, the Greek speaker pronounced the sound as the
'i' in IPA [i].  If there had not been CD with a native speaker, I would
have learned yet another system of pronouncing Greek that bore little
resemblance to any language living or dead.  In a language as broadly used
as English, any English examples of Greek sounds will suffer from dialect
differences.  IPA is the best way to represent Greek sounds.  "Economic",
"sit", or even "machine" all represent different values of "i" in my region
whereas IPA [i] is the same here and everywhere.

Brent Hudson
Moncton, NB
Canada




-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Chet Creider
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 11:55 AM
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [B-Greek] Pronuncing PILATOS

There is not and never was any justification for pronouncing the "i"
in PILATOS as in English "pie".  This was doubtless simply an error by
Mounce due to interference from the English pronunciation of the name.
The correct vowel should be that of the initial vowel in "ecology" or
"economics" (the latter pronounced with so-called "long e" (= IPA [i]), not
the initial vowel of "indeed", the vowel of "pit", etc.

Chet Creider

(Note that there are still a few teachers and students of Greek, including
NT Greek, alive who were trained in the old English system of pronunciation
(now largely supplanted in England by a more historically accurate system of
pronunciation) in which long iota _was_ pronounced as English "pie".  The
amusing story of how this happened is told in Allen's _Vox Graeca_ and has
to do with the Great Vowel Shift.  I am assuming that Mounce is an American
and was never part of this tradition.) In this system, which should never be
used, the name of the vowel BHTA is pronounced "beet-ah" or "beet-uh".)

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