[B-Greek] pee or pie

James Tauber jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat Jul 8 05:11:33 EDT 2006


I don't believe at any time in history have native speakers  
pronounced it 'pie'

As suggested in

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2005-October/035850.html

I believe the 'pie' pronunciation is due to the *English* Great Vowel  
Shift.

James Tauber


On 08/07/2006, at 7:23 AM, Mark House wrote:

> 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.




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