[B-Greek] How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek

R Yochanan Bitan Buth ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Sat Apr 9 16:17:06 EDT 2005


>Has anyone ever come upon an explanation of why one
vowel sound came to be written in several distinct
forms?  I am assuming, of course, that sounds of Greek
preceded the writing of those sounds.
Arthur King
Clinton, CT>

Good question. It comes from the way things look after the fact.
Imagine a kid in Wyoming/Utah who asks “Why do those tall pillar rocks
grow out of the ground?” IN fact, the tall pillars are usually what
remain after softer rocks around them wash away. 

The same with vowels in a language. A system develops to write the
sounds. Then the SOUNDS change over a century or more and occasionally
words that had two distinct vowels end up homonyms. People continue to
write the old word but pronounce with the new system. English
examples? Some US people pronounce ‘Don’ and ‘dawn’ as the same word.
Others distinguish these words. But everybody continues writing the
old system. So it might appear that some people have started to write
one sound with two symbols /o/ and /aw/. 

Incidently, vowel systems often undergo rapid change over a century or
so and then may remain stable for many many centuries. When two vowels
collapse into one, other vowels may adjust and reconfigure. This
happened drastically in English between the time of Roger Bacon and
Shakespeare. "night" did not have an [a] sound before the [i], "feet"
were pronounced like today's "fate", and "fate" was like some people
pronounce "fought" today. For Greek, the big change came between
300BCE and 150 BCE.

PS: I mis-counted on the Ersamian vowel system. The US system is only
eight-vowel, the European 'rasmi is nine-vowel with ü. Both mis-map
for Roman period Koine, putting some sounds together that were
distinct for Paul and Luke, while separating some of what was the
same, and reversing the sound of some. Most Erasmian has one more
peculiarity, they get all of the consonants (veta, dhelta, ghama, Pi,
Teta, Ki) historically backwards. Erasmian neatly flips fricatives and
stops, which adds to its non-Greek impression: instead of the ancient
stops still in use in the first century, (p,t,k with aspiration), it
has fricative fi, theta, chi, as became correct after the NT at the
end of the Roman period. But the already fricative veta, dhelta,
ghama, are ignored in Ersamian. If they want fricatives, a good
choice, they might include the ones that were historically first!
[veta, dhelta, ghama]. Fortunately, that is sub-phonmeic and does not
affect meaning. You can see more of this in the paper at
www.biblicalulpan.org "courses" "Greek Materials" PDF download.


Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il






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