[B-Greek] Lord's Prayer in Greek

Raymond Regalado fwgk5942 at mb.infoweb.ne.jp
Sat May 1 10:58:02 EDT 2004


On 2004.5.1, at 07:39  PM, Kevin Riley wrote:

> Your faith in the IPA is somewhat optimistic.  The IPA if used in a 
> narrow
> phonetic transcription can record fairly precisely how a word/phrase is
> pronounced, but it cannot be used to decide how a language once was
> pronounced.

I didn't mean to suggest that the IPA could "decide" how Koine was once 
pronounced.  I only meant to suggest that, if we were going to adopt 
Erasmian -- or any pronunciation scheme for that matter -- then we 
could use the IPA so that we would be using more or less the same 
sounds.  For instance, how do we pronounce omicron?  Americans usually 
pronounce it as the IPA [a] sound (the "o" in "top", in American 
English), whereas in both ancient and modern Greek it is the IPA [o] 
sound (a pure "o" vowel).

> Its use is also far from uniform across languages or within
> languages.

Perhaps I misunderstand the purpose of the IPA, but I thought it was 
meant to provide a system for symbolizing the *same* sounds for 
everyone, regardless of one's native language.

> It is more often used phonemically rather than phonetically, and
> that brings as many problems as the Erasmian system.  As we are very
> unlikely in this world to meet a speaker of Koine or Attic Greek, the 
> effort
> to learn IPA to the level needed to 'standardise' the pronunciation of
> Classical or Koine Greek would be better put into learning to read 
> Greek.

I would say that we all have to choose some system of pronunciation 
when we start our first Greek lesson ("Lesson I, The Alphabet: alpha; 
sounds like the a in father", etc.).  Choosing to pronounce according 
to IPA sounds is just one option available (which if everyone took, 
then seminary Erasmian would be more "uniform", I would suppose, and 
Jonathan Pennington's CD recordings would sound different. ;-)).

Thanks,

Raymond Regalado
Tokyo, Japan




More information about the B-Greek mailing list