[B-Greek] PEE or PIE - Koinê pronunciation

Eric Weiss papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 15 12:56:21 EDT 2006


> 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 am not a professional Greek teacher, nor have I studied 
linguistics, so I would double-check my charts against Buth's
own paper and standard textbooks on Modern Greek pronunciation 
before accepting what I display as "gospel." I created them 
for the class I've taught at church, and have not re-checked 
them for a couple years. There is some variation even among 
Erasmian and Modern Greek as taught in various textbooks - e.g., 
whether and when to ever pronounce Zeta as "dz"; the sounds 
of omicron and omega (I'm not sure they really correspond to 
either our short "o" or our long "o"; Zodhiates' Modern 
Greek pronunciation on his CD's doesn't seem to follow as 
clear a way of pronouncing Gamma as some charts show (I don't 
even list when it's pronounced as "gh" versus pronounced as 
"y" because I wasn't able to clearly determine this from 
listening to Zodhiates (at times he seems to pronounce it 
"gh" before some vowels like Iota and Epsilon before which 
he at other times pronounces it as "y".)

I'm glad my charts helped you, though.

gives a "gh" pronunciation .





Eric S. Weiss


 		
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