[B-Greek] Re: How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek?

R Yochanan Bitan Buth ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Fri Apr 8 16:24:19 EDT 2005


Shalom Barry,

Yes,distinct spelling//pronunciations are the traditional reason. (The
other one is: 'how will scholars talk to each other? Well, they don't
use Greek and I wonder who would be able to follow a lecture in any
pronunciation?) One rule of thumb I have, is, 'if it was good enough
for Paul ...'. 
And I, too, am not a little influenced by sefardic Hebrew, though I
include `ayin and Het in my mizraHi dialect. 
In Greek, the payoff is in knowing and instantly feeling which words
were close or homonymic in the first century and which words were
distinctive. Qal vaHomer ('how much much more',) when reading the post
first-century manuscript traditions.

The US-Erasmian system joins EI with H, which is unfortunate, since
those sounds were distinct for first century ears. EI was I, not H.
This lets one hear the indicative versus subjunctive 3ms endings that
are ubiquitous. That is, EI indicative ORISTIKH was not sounded like
Hi subjunctive UPOTAKTIKH.
Many US-Erasmian versions also flip ancient O-mikron with ancient
W-mega, often obliterating O-mikron in Alfa. That last one is rather
hard to listen to and has been promulgated thru some web/software.
Koine was just one W=O, of course.
In addition, Erasmian pronounces 'open syllable U' as OU instead of
distinguishing them. Most students learn a pardigm 'I wash, you wash',
etc., though not realizing what they are doing. 
Knowing U with OI is also helpful, as soon as someone picks up a
papyrus text or NT manuscript. EPUHSE is common for 'he did'.

This only becomes 'serious' when working towards internalizing the
language. How does one want to sound at the end of the process? Fluent
and Greek? Or really BARBAROS? I find shifting in and out of KOINH as
outlined on my website and modern Greek to be without problem. Though
I tend to read and speak a lot of ITAs the first week after a trip to
Greece. I can live with that, too. Gignac thinks that it was already
phonemic in the second century, and Horrocks follows suit by
transcribing John 1 "en archi in o logos". (He must be a late-dater
for John.) There were certainly 6-vowel dialects (I, E, A, O, OU, Y;
no distinct HTA) very early on and maybe some of Paul's audiences. So
I am happy to have my ears listen to ITA while I will continue to read
HTA.

In fact, writing this makes me want to start planning this summer's
trip.

ERRWSO
Randall Buth

> 
> 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





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