[B-Greek] Pronuncing PILATOS

Philip Silouan Thompson himself at philthompson.net
Fri Aug 13 17:26:56 EDT 2004


Cirk Bejnar wrote:
> I, and others I know, often pronounce the word with a [3].
> I am undertaking a breif course in EFL (English as a
> Foreign Language) instruction.  And our material on
> pronounciation points out that the speakers of many
> languages, including Greek, have difficulty distinguishing
> those English sounds since there is only one counterpart
> in their native language.

Having taught English to Vietnamese and Bosnian refugees, I was sensitive to
the fact that people need to learn to hear distinctions among foreign sounds
(like the two different 'tch' sounds in Serbian, or 's' and 'sh' in
English.)

So when I first heard Greeks pronouncing I, H, Y, EI and OI, and they all
sounded the same to me, I thought I must be deaf to a *very* subtle
distinction. I listened as hard as I could and couldn't find it. Finally I
asked a Greek acquaintance, how different are these sounds? And he said, oh,
they're all the same. In fact second-generation Greeks in the US learn
idiomatic Greek but often need a dictionary to spell it, since there are at
least five ways to spell the 'ee' sound. Also GI turns in to 'yee' in some
cases - as in HAGIOS, (pronounced ayios). And for good luck E and AI are the
same too.

It's not a problem to have an academic pronunciation (or many of them) and a
separate liturgical pronunciation identical with modern Greek - unless you
make the mistake of trying to *speak* to a Greek. A friend of a friend went
on vacation to Greece and tried to greet people in his American seminary
Koine, and nobody knew what language he was speaking :)

Silouan


Philip Silouan Thompson
Walla Walla, Washington USA






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