[B-Greek] PEI, FEI, XEI, KSI, PSI (was pee or pie)
Randall Buth
randallbuth at gmail.com
Sun Jul 9 06:29:31 EDT 2006
Shalom Jim,
Thank you for the interaction and chance for clarification. It seems
there are always new bits to add and other bits to clarify.
ΕΓΡΑΨΑΣ EGRAPSAS
>In any event, and in all seriousness, pronunciation really has nothing
at all to do with translation or exegesis, does it? >
Only indirectly, because having a full, active sound system is
important to lucid understanding, which is a prerequisite for both
translation and exegesis. If people never speak the language, they are
missing something in the decoding network in their heads. That is
something that reading psychologists have learned in the last thirty
years. Even when people "read silently" the brain actually decodes the
sound system in a natural language in a living brain. If the sound
system is not there, or is not integrated, then a link in the bridge
to understanding is out and the person may be forced to reconstruct
pieces in a foreign language. The indirect result is an exegesis that
is done outside the language, despite all good intentions. This does
not have to be so, and it is possible to achieve second-language
fluency in a classroom. (NB: it is very difficult to achieve
second-language fluency in a classroom--see TPR Storytelling by Blaine
Ray and Contee Seely for one successful method.)
Please note: we are not talking about mother-tongue language use, but
about second-language acquisition for both teachers and students. We
want people to reach true second-language fluency, to be able to think
and mull over in their heads. I have never achieved that level in a
language that I do not speak. Helen Keller did, maybe, but she is
special and hardly the primary example of natural or efficient
language learning.
<Whether, when we
read the NT in our heads, and translate on paper or computer,>
as mentioned above, I am suggesting that what our field produces is
NOT second-language fluency, even after five or ten+ years. We can
change this if we want to, but it won't be easy.
> 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.>
There are two points here.
(1) Of course it is not life or death serious! What I said was, "Why
would NT-folk insist of being both wrong and offensive [to
Greeks-RB]?" It's kind of humorous, as is your 'life and death'.
(2) See below for the more important second point, on confusion
between phonemic systems versus phonetic production, on getting it
wrong.
> 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?>
Actually, they didn't distinguish "iota" short and long. Length as a
phonemic feature dropped out of the language in pre-Christian times
according to knowledgeable linguistic analyses and my own (which are
based on different skills and training than "philology". General
linguists and phonologists will know what I'm talking about.)
> 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.>
This is actually an important point that is being misunderstood and is
often misunderstood. No is claiming that people spoke with the same
dialectical pronunciation.
This misunderstanding needs to be cleared up. I don't care what EI/I
sounded like in one place or another and I know it was different. I do
care about how it fit/fits into the system.
Here is what is said in footnote 1 on the paper on the website
http://www.biblicalulpan.org/PDF%20Files/PRONSYS1%202005.pdf
"PLEASE NOTE: this does not mean that an ω-μεγα [W-MEGA] would sound
exactly the same as an ω-μεγα [W-MEGA] in another dialect. To the
contrary, we may assume that there would be continual small changes
from dialect to dialect and even from village to village in some
cases. What the above equivalencies mean [EI=I, AI=E, W=O, OI=U ---
rb] is that within any particular dialect, the ω-μεγα [W-MEGA],
however it is pronounced, will be pronounced like ο-μικρον [W-MIKRON]
in that dialect. Likewise, the equivalencies do not mean that marginal
dialects would not exist that did not follow the equivalencies of the
major, majority dialects. The equivalencies above point out the what a
traveller would hear in the majority dialects all over the
Mediterranean, from Rome to Judea, from the Aegean to Egypt."
In other words -- (applying this to the vowels EI and I in the post
about Greek letter names PEI PI, PSEI PSI...) --
the important point is to recognize that traders in Jerusalem would
pronounce EI the same way as they pronounced I, and officials in
Tarsus would pronounce I the same way that they pronounced EI, but
those is Tarsus would certainly not sound EI/I in the same way as
those from Jerusalem sounded EI/I. Likewise in Rome, Quintillian [the
Latin rhetoritician who knew Greek and Greek pedagogy quite well]
would have pronounced EI in the same way he that pronounced I, and
Plutarch up at Delphi would have pronounced EI and I the same. But
even though all of these people would have pronounced EI and I the
same within their respective dialect, they would not have spoken it
exactly the same way as someone from a different dialect area. We
learn that from studying the phonemic system of a language and from
human language in general, which cannot be confused with the phonetic
output. (This is the point 2, from above)
Where does this pronunciation issue fit in the overall scheme of things?
Far below fluency. We should want second-language fluency if we are
going to invest years of our time in the thing. Anyway, I demand it
for myself. And the means are now available for making this more
achievable on a mass scale than in the days of WHD Rouse. Especially
with publishers waking up to the relative ease of producing CDs.
Once we agree on that goal, and only after we decide on that goal,
then we need to decide how we want to sound when we get there. (That
is the point of my paper on the website.) If people do not want to
fluently think in a language, then let them not do whatever they want
to not do. They can even say to themselves la-gas instead of lo-ghos.
If they were fluent, I would even be able to talk to them. But why
defend [ble-"pay"] (BLEPEI ) or LAGAS "word", when our target language
didn't do that? Let's at least try to get 'in the ball park'.
I heard a song last month that sounded ridiculous, they were singing
hAGIAS hAGIAS hAGIAS. The "h" didn't bother me at all, but "of the
holy female thing" was downright funny if not so unintentionally
wrong. Publishers and teachers of the next generation could and should
prevent these "fox paws".
Let's do what we know to be right and what we know works in real
language learning, and avoid what we know is wrong and what we know
doesn't work. ['we' = second-language acquisition
specialists/theorists, and has no reference to whatever may be
currently practiced in the field of ancient Greek] We will end up in
the same ballpark. We will be able to play on the same team and even
be able to throw to the cutoff at second base.
turning to Greek intros:
EI UGIAINEIS, EU AN EXOI
PRO MEN PANTWN EUXOMAI SE UGEIAINEIN
KA'GW UGEIAINW (loeb, sel.papyri 111, 2c ad)
PRO MEN PANTWN EUXOMAI SE UGIAINEIN ...
KAI KALWS MOI ESTIN (loeb, sel.papyri 112, 2c ad)
KAI DIA PANTOS EUXOMAI SE UGIENEIN
KAI EGW UGIENW (loeb, sel.papyri 113, 2c ad)
KAI DIA PANTOS EUXOMAI SAI UGEIAINEIN
(loeb, sel.papyri 120, 2c ad)
(I love it when they spell like that,
you can almost hear them singing their beautiful, clear vowels)
Before/thru all, I pray you are well,
I too am well.
Randall Buth
--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
randallbuth at gmail.com
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