[B-Greek] Re: How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek?
nebarry at verizon.net
nebarry at verizon.net
Fri Apr 8 14:07:38 EDT 2005
>
> From: "R Yochanan Bitan Buth" <ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il>
> Date: 2005/04/08 Fri PM 02:08:30 EDT
> To: <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
> CC: jpbuchan at gmail.com
> Subject: [B-Greek] Re: How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek?
> I would add an anecdote that I believe is true though I haven't
> verified it: Erasmus had trouble "getting his head around Greek" and
> didn't feel that he 'got' it until he visited Venice where he joined a
> circle who were reading old Greek texts AND SPEAKING GREEK.
> Presumably, some of those in the circle were Greeks who were still
> writing in a "semi-classical style" and pronouncing Greek as modern.
> Erasmus, of course, would have been comparing his Greek functionally
> to Latin, a language that educated people of his time could listen to
> in speeches and read and write in books.
Erasmean Greek does allow the modern reader to make maximum distinctions in sounds, which sometimes helps with understanding a text a bit better, and that's always been my defense of it. However, I learned Hebrew using Sephardic pronunciation (Ashkenazi sounds really weird to me, saying "Adonoi" instead of Adonai), not the artificial "classical" pronunciation used in some American schools, and it didn't cause any problems, so maybe learning modern Greek pronunciation at the beginning wouldn't be so bad after all.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter
Adjunct Faculty, CUTS
http://www.cuts.edu
bhofstetter at cuts.edu
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list