[B-Greek] PEE or PIE - Koinê pronunciation

Mark House mark at thehousehouse.com
Sat Jul 15 09:29:43 EDT 2006


Thanks to all who weighed in on the "PEE vs. PIE" thread. It's been an 
interesting discussion overall. I never dreamed that a variation of my 
semi-offensive thread title would end up on large, brightly colored protest 
buttons! I guess that's what you get when you punch a B-Greek hot button.

Thanks particularly to those who addressed the specific question I was 
asking regarding how they learned to pronounce the names of the Greek 
letters ending in iota. I take it from the few responses that were directed 
to this narrow issue that the pedagogical field is pretty well divided, as I 
suspected.

With the pronunciation purists, I too would favor pedagogically moving in a 
more modern Greek direction in terms of pronunciation, and have been 
genuinely impressed with Randall Buth's efforts to recover a sense of 
authentic first-century Greek pronunciation, which seems to be much closer 
to the modern scheme than the Erasmian one. I remember some years ago 
translating a first-century letter by a relatively uneducated person and 
discovering that many of the spelling errors in the text were based on a 
confusion between iota and epsilon-iota, which convinced me that these two 
probably sounded the same at that time.

However, with the pragmatists who weighed in I fear that the Titanic of NT 
Greek pedagogy will not be turned on a dime. My own reluctance to take the 
plunge in the direction of a more authentic pronunciation scheme over the 
past decade of seminary Greek teaching arises from a well-grounded suspicion 
that I will be inculcating a system of pronunciation in my classes that is 
out of step with what every other student is learning in the institution in 
which I teach (and in all similar institutions nearby, for that matter). The 
problem is that once students leave my class and move on to their 
second-year exegetical courses, they will be using a pronunciation scheme 
that will confuse their fellow students and perhaps even a few of their 
professors. Call me wishy-washy, but I see an advantage to an agree-upon 
pronunciation scheme, even if it isn't pristinely true either to 
first-century or modern Greek speech. And I have to agree with Jim West that 
this isn't a matter essential to effective exegesis, anyway. I suspect that 
there is a large measure of inconsistency between the pronunciation schemes 
learned by various B-Greekers, yet they seem to have no problem engaging in 
high-level exegetical discussions with those who may pronounce the language 
differently than they do.

Ironically, the whole discussion of Erasmian vs. Buthian vs. modern 
pronunciation sidesteps the more narrow question entirely, since according 
to Eric Weiss's excellent comparison charts (thanks for your work, Eric) the 
basic iota sound is the same in all three systems (except that the Buthian 
scheme apparently doesn't allow for a short iota sound as in "pit," but that 
wasn't one of the options we were considering for our audio files anyway). I 
learned the artificial Erasmian scheme in college, but nevertheless learned 
PEE, not PIE, which was a completely consistent pronunciation of the letter, 
spelled P-Iota, within that scheme. Of course, I recognize that the broader 
issue here isn't really PEE vs. PIE, but authentic vs. artificial, and am 
well aware that the British-Classical-scientific PIE is not even close to 
how Greeks at any time would have pronounced the sixteenth letter of their 
alphabet.

I'm afraid I must confess that at least until the movement for a purer 
biblical Greek pronunciation becomes more widespread, the Greek tools I have 
a hand in publishing for our largely American audiences will of necessity 
continue the artificial yet widely recognized "Erasmian" scheme (with 
apologies to Erasmus). However, I will continue to make it clear in Greek 
classes that I teach that this is now widely recognized to be a somewhat 
artificial scheme that misses the mark of authentic first-century 
pronunciation at many points. As I have in the past, I will continue to 
remind students from time to time of how modern Greek speakers pronounce 
things, as well as to show comparison samples of first-century vs. modern 
Greek. Eventually I suspect that the Titanic will turn, but in the meantime, 
pass me a button!

Mark House





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