[B-Greek] Pronunciation rules

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Mon Oct 3 18:21:33 EDT 2005


Mounce's pronunciation is incorrect.

There are no circumstances in which an iota in Greek should be  
pronounced like "ai"

The fact this happens in English is due to something called the Great  
Vowel Shift which affected *English* vowel pronunciation from around  
the 15th century.


James Tauber


On 04/10/2005, at 5:53 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:

>
> My son and I are studying Biblical Greek for this year's homeschool
> elective. We have Dr. Bill Mounce's book, workbook and lectures on CD.
> We are only into Chapter 4 so this might be a premature question  
> that is
> covered later on in the book, but we are encountering our first
> vocabulary words and trying to be good students we are guessing at the
> pronunciations given what we learned in Chapter 3 about letter sounds,
> long and short vowels, diphthongs, gamma nasals, diaresis and iota
> subscripts and there is one word we just can't understand how Dr.  
> Mounce
> pronounces the way he does.
>
> Pilatos (Pi iota lambda alpha tau omicron sigma) Dr. Mounce pronouces
> the the iota with the same sound as the i in the english phrase "I am"
> or the diphthong ai (alpha iota) I can't find a rule anywhere that  
> says
> I pronouce it that way. Are there exceptions in Greek  
> pronounciation the
> way there are in English. Someone I asked thought that perhaps this  
> was
> a Latin word that had be translated into Greek and so Dr. Mounce was
> using the Latin pronouncation.
>
> Any help?
>
> Sean Kelly
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