[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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