[B-Greek] How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek
ARTHUR KING
amgking at sbcglobal.net
Sat Apr 9 16:00:23 EDT 2005
Thank you Randall and Barry for those illuminating
explanations. It never made sense to me that the
ancient Greeks had one sound for so many vowels.
Arthur King
Clinton, CT
--- R Yochanan Bitan Buth <ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il>
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.
> 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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