[B-Greek] How do modern Greeks pronounce Biblical Greek

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at ioa.com
Tue Jan 17 07:19:32 EST 2006


On Jan 17, 2006, at 4:10 AM, Martin Petersen wrote:

> I have been fascinated by this thread giving tantalizing glimpses  
> of how
> scholars have arrived at pronunciation for Koine and Attic Greek.  
> It has
> long puzzled me that grammars give quite definite guidance on  
> pronunciation
> of letters and accents but with little to show as to how they have  
> arrived
> at these conclusions.
> Would any list member be kind enough to say a little more or point  
> me in the
> right direction for me to be able to research further?
> I hope this is considered an appropriate request and not   
> tangential to
> B-Greek's area of coverage.

Certainly this is an appropriate request, but it is a complicated  
story and one that no doubt can be told from varying perspectives.  
The celebrated article by Caragounis (available online at http:// 
www.bsw.org/project/filologia/filo08/Art06m.html) and his more recent  
book (with the obscene price!) on development of Biblical Greek  
referred to in one of the previous posts in the thread may be  
illuminating, although some are inclined to think they have their own  
bias. What is commonly taught in many, perhaps most school classes in  
Greek is the Erasmian pronunciation, the only real virtue of which is  
that it is standard, it differentiates vowels and diphthongs from  
each other more or less clearly and thus allows interaction with  
spoken forms of ancient Greek between class-members and others who  
have learned Greek with the same system of pronunciation. But the  
Erasmian system cannot claim any legitimate relationship to the way  
Greek was ever pronounced by native speakers in any era. One of the  
most widely-respected accounts of ancient Greek pronunciation is W.  
Sidney Allen's _Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek_  
(published by Cambridge UP); I won't try to reproduce its arguments  
or attempt a simple representation of sounds of characters as set  
forth in that, but there are a few more recent textbooks that present  
pronunciation as set forth in Allen's book -- one notable such  
textbook is the JACT "Reading Greek" course. Caragounis argues that  
even Allen's account of classical Greek pronunciation is just another  
formulation of the wrong-headed Erasmian system. My own view is that  
(a) one should adopt a pronunciation scheme of one's choice on the  
clear understanding that this system of pronunciation at best  
represents the pronunciation only of some one time and place in the  
long history of the Greek langauge, and that (b) Randall Buth's  
scheme is far and away the most probable actual pronunciation of  
Biblical Greek; his accounting is accessible at http:// 
www.biblicalulpan.org/pages/greekssmat1.html -- go to the bottom of  
the page to hH KOINE PROFORA and you can find a downloadable file  
expounding the system; he also has sound files exemplifying  
pronunciation by the reading of some NT texts.

I would add that, in view of what we've seen on this list for the  
last two or three years, you can expect this topic to be raised anew  
every month or two for the foreseeable future; every new learner  
coming to the list for the first time tends to ask that question, and  
then most of those who have formed firm convictions as to the proper  
answer will chime in in response. I don't fault them for doing so,  
but I don't think we're going to have any consensus on the matter and  
I think that the question and the standard answers are going to keep  
coming back again and again.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/




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