[B-Greek] pee or pie
frjsilver at optonline.net
frjsilver at optonline.net
Fri Jul 7 21:12:55 EDT 2006
Dear Friends --
In spite of the best efforts of the British educational system in the past, and of college fraternities and sororities in the present, the standard is to regard _iota_ as a long vowel AS IN GREEK, not as in English.
We all know that _nice_ has a 'long i' in English, but _Nice_ has a 'long i' in French. The same is true of Latin and Greek, in spite of people who would say 'vy-vat ree-jy-na'.
So, 'the sweetheart of Sigma Ky' might be rethought....
Learning Modern Greek, children are taught such rhyming things as ALFA VHTA, FAGEI PITA, or -- in our parlance -- 'alpha, beta, eats a sandwich'. It suffers in translation, I know....
Peace and blessings to all.
Father James Silver
Monk James
Orthodox Church in America
----- Original Message -----
From: Mark House
Date: Friday, July 7, 2006 7:23 pm
Subject: [B-Greek] pee or pie
To: b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org
> As Hendrickson Publishers' Greek editor I'm currently working on
> a book that
> will feature a CD with audio files to aid in learning the Greek
> alphabet and
> pronunciation. One of the issues that has arisen in reviewing
> the files is
> the pronunciation of the names of Greek letters ending in i (xi,
> pi, phi,
> chi, psi). When I studied New Testament Greek, I learned to
> pronounce these
> letters using the long iota sound (xee, pee, phee, chee, psee).
> This makes
> sense, since some NT Greek grammars, when naming the letters,
> spell them out
> in Greek using the letter in question plus an iota. However, it
> is
> apparently common in classical Greek circles to pronounce these
> letters the
> way they are pronounced in science (all rhyming with "pie"). I'm
> interested
> in finding out whether the latter pronunciation is also used
> commonly in NT
> Greek classes. Our classically trained author uses the latter
> pronunciation,
> but will opt for the former if it is more commonly used in NT
> contexts.
> Thanks in advance for your input.
>
> Mark House
> Hendrickson Publishers
>
>
> ---
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