[B-Greek] Off Subject Question: Homer

R Yochanan Bitan Buth ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Fri Sep 9 12:18:48 EDT 2005


Shalom Jeremy,
Ap Khese Hen? 
Ti Ke.  
            (aspirates? I don't remember)

I enjoyed your comments on aspirated stops. They do raise issues.

> If anyone is serious about wanting to pronounce phi, theta, and
chi as aspirates, you might find it helpful to practice on a modern
language where aspiration is distinctive.  Some good examples are
Hindi and Urdu, spoken in India and Pakistan.  In these languages, the
aspirated stops [ph], [th], and [kh] contrast with the unaspirated
stops [p], [t], and [k], exactly as in Ancient Greek.  I've been
living in India for three years and learned Hindi to a fairly high
level, but it took a lot of practice to get used to pronouncing and
recognizing these sounds.>  

Exactly. Trying to control the subphonemic part of Greek would take a
tremendous amount of energy, and there are enough people ready to give
'flak' [=diss someone] just for suggesting that controlling the
ancient language is desirable. Asking them to control a difficult,
sub-phonemic feature would add oil to the fire.] Plus, the stops had
started their change already BEFORE the NT (with voiced stops) and
completed the process relatively soon after (voiceless stops as you've
been describing).

>One thing I have noticed is that the aspirated stops are aspirated a
lot more strongly than in English.  This increases the acoustic
difference, and makes it easier to recognize which sound is which.  I
think it's highly probably that Ancient Greek consonants were
pronounced the same way.>  

Again, I would agree. They should be close enough to be recognizable
as the correct phoneme, without any doubt, for someone in a time
machine. The stronger aspiration also be expected. Where a feature is
phonemic, the etic realizations tend to comfortably separate from each
other. E.g., we keep 't' and the interdental 'th' quite separate,
while languages that do not use the two sounds will let their 't'
slide closer to the teeth in an etic realization.

>It's not enough to pronounce theta, for instance, like an English "t"
at the beginning of a word.  You have to give it a stronger puff of
air.  When I listen to recordings of people reading Ancient Greek
texts, the aspiration never sounds quite right to me.  Although
Kitzinger's recording of Elektra is very impressive (and she reads
with such expression!), she still doesn't put enough aspiration on 
the aspirated consonants, and sometimes aspiration creeps in on those
that should not have it.  A little bit of practice with an Indian
language might cure this.> 

This is good. You see the humor in this? One becomes fluent in Hindi
so that one can pronounce 'phi', 'theta', 'khi' as in early
Koine//ancient Greek. And a non-phonemic feature, to boot. Of course,
if teachers in all the schools, or at least the good schools and in
the recordings were already doing this, then one could assimilate and
adapt more straightforwardly. 
In honesty on the extra-foreign-language criticism, I should add that
I have had Americans complain about learning U-PSILON correctly.
"You're making us speak French Greek!". The point with the vowels,
though, is that a PHONEMIC distinction must keep U-psilon separate
from OU. Plus, many students have been exposed to German or French,
and most teachers are expected to have been exposed to quite a bit of
German and French. 

> My personal preference is to read
the NT with Modern Greek pronunciation, but that is another topic.>

You've made a good choice for the NT and Roman era. Basically, all you
would need to do for a Koine reading style would be to add "OI/U", for
the six-vowel, late-Roman variety. That is, to add one extra sound
'French u' to your Modern Greek. If you added 'HTA' and distinguish it
from "AI/E", you could defend the outcome as a fully phonemic Koine.
Then your UMIN and HMIN, UMAS and HMAS, ktl. Will sound distinct and
correct.

Randall Buth 


Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
and Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
Hebrew University, Rothberg International School
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il






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