[B-Greek] Re: phonological flow and syntactic(al) structure

Chet Creider creider at uwo.ca
Fri Apr 29 10:03:17 EDT 2005


Carl Conrad wrote:
> Eric, I think you should be aware that, although the W. Sydney Allen 
> book is widely regarded as authoritative regarding ancient Greek 
> pronunciation, serious challenges to its validity have been raised, 
> challenges which quite a few have deemed valid; you ought also to read 
> carefully through Chrys Caragounis' now classic paper, "The Error of 
> Erasmus and Un-Greek Pronunciation of Greek" on line at
> 
> 	http://www.bsw.org/project/filologia/filo08/Art06m.html
> 
> and you ought also to look at Randall Buth's paper "Notes on the 
> Pronunciation System of Phonemic Koine Greek" which is readable on-line 
> or downloadable at
> 	
> 	http://www.biblicalulpan.org/pages/greekssmat1.html

I would like both to disagree strongly and agree strongly here. 
Specifically:

(1) I am not aware of any serious challenges to the accuracy of Allen 
with respect to the pronunciation of Attic Greek.  The paper by 
Caragounis is so misleading that I recommend that it not be read by 
anyone interested in reconstructing the pronunciation of Ancient Greek. 
  I can sympathize with his dissatisfaction with the various Erasmian 
pronunciations which exist, and with a desire on the part of Greeks to 
see a modern pronunciation used for the ancient language (as was hinted 
at by Smyth in his Greek Grammar and is used by modern Icelanders in 
their pronunciation of Old Norse), but one should not confuse a 
practical pronunciation of an ancient language with the way it actually 
was pronounced.  Let me give just one example of the countless errors 
made by Caragounis: he suggests that H was nothing more than a variant 
of E made long by stress accent.  There is no evidence that Ancient 
Greek had a stress accent.  It had a pitch accent.  There is plenty of 
evidence for the occurrence of H in accented and non-accented positions, 
and it is also clear that H was not a variant of E since its later 
history was entirely independent of that of H: H rose from a position 
somewhat like that of the vowel 'a' in the sound made by a sheep's "baa" 
to a sound like that of 'i' in English "machine".  (It most certainly 
was _not_ pronounced like that in Ancient Greek, nor even in the Koine
of the time of Christ.)  E on the other hand has always stayed where it 
was (roughly as the vowel in English 'bet' in most North American and 
Brtish but not southern hemispheric pronunciations) or fallen slightly 
from a slighly higher position.

In addition to Allen's book, which is very good, I also recommend 
Sturtevant's The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin.  This book is 
superior to Allen's in two ways: it gives in the original Greek and in 
translation all of the information from Greek grammarians as to the 
pronunciation of their language and it traces the history of each sound 
from Homeric times down into Koine times.

(2) On the other hand, I cannot recommend strongly enough the paper by 
Randall Buth.  Buth's paper deals with two somewhat separate issues: the 
pronunciation of Greek around the time Christ lived and the period 
immediately after and a recommended practical pronunciation for our 
times.  It is important to realize that these are two separate matters. 
  For example, there is very little evidence for the fricative 
pronunciation of Q, F and X (theta, phi, chi) during this period (as 
shown, for example, by the use of these characters in the orthography of 
Coptic, dating probably from the 2nd c. A.D.), but it is virtually 
impossible for speakers of most Western European languages, including 
English, to make the necessary contrasts between simple T, P, K (tau, 
pi, kappa) and these aspirated consonants, so Buth recommends adoption 
of the modern Greek fricative pronunciations for these sounds.  This 
does not mean that that is how they were pronounced in the relevant 
period of the Koine.  Other examples: although H was not pronounced like 
the 'i' in "machine" yet, EI was, and Buth advocates that it be 
pronounced in this way.  I believe that some mp3 files illustrating 
Buth's recommended pronunciation are available in the vicinity of the 
URL Carl has given.  I recommend listening to these as although they 
utilize his practical system, this is nevertheless a system which is 
very close to that of the Koine in the first century A.D.

Chet Creider



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