[B-Greek] PEI, FEI, XEI, KSI, PSI (was pee or pie)
Jim West
jwest at highland.net
Sat Jul 8 13:54:51 EDT 2006
Randall Buth wrote:
> The question on the names of Greek letters was raised and the answers
> have been provided, if people were paying attention.
>
Sometimes, sometimes not.
;-)
In any event, and in all seriousness, pronunciation really has nothing
at all to do with translation or exegesis, does it? Whether, when we
read the NT in our heads, and translate on paper or computer, we
pronounce "i" sounds long or short, is life or death serious, seems as
equal a "no brainer" as whether the folk who spoke Koine pronounced it
one way or the other.
And really, can we be ever so confident about how first century
Palestinian Christians or Diaspora Jews (the first writers and readers
of the NT after all) pronounced "i" short or long? What if they
pronounced it like the Semitic "yod"? Or like the native speakers of
Tarsus? We have no recordings so it really is all pure speculation.
Anyway, have you ever heard any speaker of modern English pronounce
vowels exactly the same everywhere in the world? "i" in England is a
bit different than in Scotland and that a bit different than in Wales
and Ireland. Southern americans say "i" considerably differently than
northerners or westerners. Your imagined homogenous pronunciation the
Koine world over seems equally unlikely. It doesn't really stretch the
imagination to think that Koine was pronounced differently in Gaul than
it was in Sicily.
Best
Jim
--
Jim West, ThD
http://web.infoave.net/~jwest -- Biblical Studies Resources
http://petrosbaptistchurch.blogspot.com -- Weblog
Je mehr Gnade, desto weniger Sünde -- Huldrych Zwingli
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