[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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