[B-Greek] Off Subject Question: Homer

Gregg Geist iareth at io.com
Wed Sep 7 22:19:49 EDT 2005


Khairete!

I just ran into the post on pronunciation.  This is actually on topic.  I 
am pretty bad at reading Greek out loud, but I've mastered the first few 
lines of the Gospel of John, and it's worth doing.  So here is a review of 
the audio recordings.  I learned the pronunciation of the languages by 
reading original documents from Greek and Roman authors on pronunciation. 
(Alas, awhile ago, so it will be hard to look up those sources again.)

Neither
           http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/poetry_and_prose/poetry.html
nor
           http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/
use the ancient readings of either the accents of Theta, Chi, and 
Phi.  Those three consonants were always pronounced like t, k, and p are in 
the beginning of English words, which is very different from the way they 
are in the middle of the words, though we don't notice.  An ancient Greek 
would spell our word "papa" "phapa", our pronunciation of "taco" "thako", 
and "con" "khan".
  	The accents were changes upward in pitch by a fifth interval.  The 
circumflex represented a high pitch on the first part of a long syllable 
then falling across the syllable.  The acute represented rising pitch on a 
long syllable or merely high pitch on a short syllable.  The grave 
represented no pitch change in a place where one might be expected.  The 
pitch accent became a stress accent sometime around the 4th century.  I 
believe the aspirated consonants chi, theta, and phi changed to h, th, and 
f at about the same time.
  	Syllable length is the hardest thing for English speakers to do, but it 
was very important for ancient poetry.  We still use the word "meter" for 
poetry, even though we don't mean it literally anymore.  I'm not going to 
try to describe the complexities of this here.  A good first approximation 
is to spend twice as much time sounding omega as omicron, omicron-upsilon 
as upsilon, and eta as epsilon.  Also, any vowel with a corcumflex is 
long.  Japanese does this instead of stress, which is why the people 
covering the Olympics in Nagano, Japan, several years ago did a whole piece 
on the way the natives said the name of their town.  They didn't care about 
the accent, but cared about length, so no foreigner could say it, and no 
Japanese seemed able to explain it.
  	Biblical Greek was pronounced like Classical greek.  At least, the 
Gospel of John is written as if it were, and I know that in the time of 
Catullus, phi, theta, and chi were aspirated, because the Latin poet makes 
fun of Greek pronunciation in one of his poems.  In any case, some Greeks 
and Romans were interested in all this stuff, so they wrote down how things 
were supposed to be pronounced, so we still know this stuff even though the 
original forms of the languages are "dead".

The readings of "Elektra" by Kitzinger and "Olympian" by Muller on
           http://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/Greek.htm
are definitely correct. Those by Daitz are technically correct, though he 
souinds like he is trying too hard.  The reading from "Birds" sounds funny, 
though, like it should, though some of the accents are off.

Good luck

Phileo.

Gregg Geist




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