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

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat Apr 9 15:19:53 EDT 2005


On 9/4/05 1:09 PM, "ARTHUR KING" <amgking at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 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.

They were distinct sounds at the time the orthography was established and
later sounded changes weren't accompanied by changes in spelling (in most
cases). Same thing happened to English.

Indo-European originally had 10 vowels: A, E, I, O and U in short and long
forms.

Before the adoption of the Ionic alphabet in 403 B.C., Greek had five vowel
symbols suggestive of those original Indo-European vowels, without a
short/long distinction.

However, the pronunciation of the original long mid-vowels (long E and long
O) had, even pre-classically, split depending on whether the vowel was the
result of compensatory lengthening or not.

Furthermore, U had become fronted (i.e. like u-umlaut in German) and the
long O from compensatory lengthening had started to move to fill it's place.

So at the time the Ionic alphabet was adopted in Athens, Greek actually had
12 vowel sounds:

A, I and U - short and long (but with U fronted, although still rounded)
E, O - short, long and more closed (closer to I, U), long and more open
(closer to A)

A, I and U continued to be written the same, short or long.
E and O continued to be written the same in their short variant.

The long more closed forms for E and O were written EI and OU respectively
because their sounds were closer to I and U. These are the spurious
diphthongs because they are really just one sound written with two letters
(like English 'sh').

In Ionic, the letter 'H' was originally used to mark rough breathing but
because rough breathing had dropped out of Ionic by 403 B.C., the letter
could be re-purposed for the more-open long E.

All the remained was to create a new letter for the more-open long O and so
a new symbol was created and put at the end of the alphabet.

After 403 B.C., sound changes continued. By the 1st century A.D. EI had
become even more closed to sound like I and H had started to move to where
EI had been. The vowel shifts continued over hundreds of years to eventually
result in Modern Greek pronunciation.

English underwent a similar game of "move the vowels around" and in the case
of English, this is referred to as the Great Vowel Shift. see
http://alpha.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm for more details on that.

James Tauber





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