[B-Greek] Pronunciation rules
bitan buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Thu Oct 6 15:08:22 EDT 2005
I'll try interspersing some emails here:
Jon EGRAPSEN
> The problem with trying to get everyone to pronounce the greek vowels the
same is that even if you picked one system and said, for example, omicron
sounds like the 'o' in hot or whatever - that means something completely
different to English speaking people living in America, England, Australia,
New Zealand, South Africa, India etc etc. As an Australian you'd probably be
horrified to hear me read greek :)
RB
** how's your Hebrew sound?
Or French? (see below next note.)
KAI PROSEQHKEN
> On the other hand, didn't Koine come into existance from the influence of
many different languages and cultures on Greek? So even then wouldn't people
have pronounced things quite differently, just as English is spoken very
differently accross the world? Maybe there really is some validity to the
idea "to each his own" since the idea of one correct historical
pronunciation may be as much a fantasy as the student studying 21st century
English in 2000 years trying to work out how our English vowels are
'supposed to' sound.
Jon Rumble
RB **
Yes and no. Some of this confuses what we know and how simple some things are/were. I will quote from the website article [vowels are rewritten in ASCII], the footnote is important for correctly interpreting the basic statements:
"The following four vowel pairs are known to be equivalent within respective dialects throughout the Mediterranean world of Koine Greek:
[EI] was pronounced the same as [I]
[AI] was pronounced the same as [E]
[W] was pronounced the same as [O[
[OI] was pronounced the same as [U[ [i.e., French u--RB]
{footnote: this does not mean that an W-mega would sound exactly the same as an W-mega in another dialect. To the contrary, we may assume that there would be continual small changes from dialect to dialect and even from village to village in some cases. What the above equivalencies mean is that within any particular dialect, the W-mega, however it is pronounced, will be pronounced like O-mikron in that dialect.
Likewise, the equivalencies do not mean that marginal dialects would not exist that did not follow the equivalencies of the major, majority dialects. The equivalencies above point out the what a traveller would hear in the majority dialects all over the Mediterranean, from Rome to Judea, from the Aegean to Egypt.}"
The above pairs are single "phonemes", that is, they represent a sound that distinguishes meaning for the speakers. You will notice that Erasmian is not just different, it misgroups some of the sounds. Paul and Luke heard EI like I, but Erasmians pronounce EI like HTA. This thread started on the name PEILATOS. Note the good ol' uncial spelling. It's nice to know what a scribe was saying/hearing/writing. TOUT'ESTIN PILATOS.
Likewise, Paul and Luke would have kept A and W apart, that is A and O apart. This is not difficult, and it represents a phonemic distinction that already exists for English speakers (even the ones who go out of their way to produce O=A! FEU TOUTOU, DIA TI?)
Anyway, modern speakers can take the modern language, add a "French u" and a "close HTA", and they will be back in the NT/Imperial period. If they only add "French u" they will be back in the late Imperial period (200-300 CE). Not bad as a time machine. (If they ignore U-psilon, too, they will have a phonemic Byzantine pronunciation, say around 500-1000 CE to the present.)
Eric HRWTHSEN:
>So, by the end of the Roman period, the eta had become
an "ee" sound, but both upsilon and the omicron-iota
diphthong were still ü (French "u") - or had the
omicron-iota diphthong also become "ee"?
Eric S. Weiss>
RB ** NAI, HTA HN WS "I",
ALLA "U" DIEMENEN WS "OI"
KAI EGRAPSEN
> Most Biblical Hebrew texts use a modern Hebrew pronunciation, I believe, even though it's different for several consonants than the "classical" Hebrew pronunciation. Why shouldn't the
> same be done with NT Greek - i.e., use the Modern Greek pronunciation?
RB** Greek probably needs to be discussed on its own. Modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew are closer than the Greek dialects. BH and MH have "high" intelligibility in simple narrative genre. 99-100% of modern morphology fits biblical. Pleasing readers today still use Ayin and Het. So-called "classical" pronunciation in the US usually means no retracted-tongue-consonants whatsover. I am happy if the student can speak the language, any dialect, though I have yet to meet someone fluent in "classical" that does not speak modern Hebrew too. I'm sure someone is out there, just haven't met them.
KAI Eric:
> Granted, there are difficulties with using a Modern Greek pronunciation for Koinê . . .
if I read and understood Caragounis and Buth correctly, is that a very-close-to-Modern-Greek pronunciation, including the "ee" for many vowels, had pretty much arrived within the first few centuries of the Christian era ...
Hence, I see no really valid arguments against using the Modern Greek pronunciation for NT.
RB**--Well, at least "ee" [i] for one vowel EI.
I'm not sure whether Caragounis would be happy with what I am doing or not. Between the lines I think he is aware that he should add something for a true Koine, but I am not sure that he would consider it proper to stop and ask the question. Greeks that I have spoken to have at least been able to follow me when discussing NT or Homer, and seem to accept what I am doing as "Greek". The extra vowel(s) is unnecessary for them, of course. But do Greeks realize that demanding a full modern system tends to be rejected in toto by the academic community and leaves foreign students adopting a system that Greeks feel is unacceptable/offensive?
I'm [RB] suggesting a way out of the impasse.
Your bottom line: OMOLOGW SOI: There are no valid arguments against modern Greek. It is a good system for reading texts and fits in with today's speakers. The NT was probably 80% closer to modern than Erasmian.
Adding one/two vowels would be better. It might provide a compromise that allows someone to slide in and out of ancient/modern speech. When speaking modern Greek the old morphology doesn't work anyway, certainly no infinitives or datives, and one can easily adjust in listening when everything is already the same, plus extra two extra vowels. If a person was speaking Greek and quoted something in Erasmian, the Erasmian would become a blank. Quoting with "French u" just sounds like Greek from foreigner. HTA is out, though. It becomes ITA. I will be on an island in two weeks and am already prepared to de-HTA. I don't worry if a French-u slips in because it is correctly heard/placed with [i]. Again, the two vowels are only necessary if one wants to internalize the ancient language.
If one is content to speak modern but read ancient, the ancient will probably stay fairly distant, but a five vowel system works great. In fact thru most of the Byzantine period people were speaking with the modern five vowels and reading/writing ancient. The difference between that situation and modern English is that we don't write Beowolfian/pre-Chaucer. Anyway, I am not satisfied with "speaking modern" as a fulfilling framework for ancient. Close, yes, but the gap is just too much. In my experience it's bigger than written//spoken Arabic. (Surprise: I advocate that persons learning Arabic learn to speak a colloquial dialect, preferably first. In the Arab world a foreigner does not 'know' Arabic until they can communicate orally AND read the literature/(`ala kull-i Haal mafruud an yiqra al-jaraayid "at least reading journalese").
Blessings
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
c/o margbuth at gmail.com
also, Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
under Rothberg International School,
Hebrew University
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list