[B-Greek] Re: How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek?
Patrick Narkinsky
patrick at narkinsky.com
Thu Apr 14 16:46:20 EDT 2005
N.E. Barry wrote:
> 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.
While I am still a very "little Greek", I know that when I moved to the
modern pronunciation I saw an immediate jump in my fluency and comfort with
the language. I also found that I had a much easier time remembering
vocabulary in that pronunciation. It was as if I had removed a mental block
of some kind.
However, I have not found that the modern pronunciation helps me do the sort
of detailed grammatical analysis that seems to be the most common paradigm
for Greek study, and this is the primary area of study where your rationale
for the Erasmian pronunciation makes sense. A modern pronunciation helps me
understand the language intuitively, but not analytically.
(I often wonder, however, how helpful detailed grammatical analysis is in
the absence of intuitive comprehension. But that's another question.)
--
Patrick Narkinsky
Pastor
Mount Hermon Baptist Church
Mineral, VA
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