[B-Greek] Rules for Modern Greek pronunciation of gamma?
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 15 11:12:07 EDT 2006
>From things I've read, the modern Greek pronunciation of gamma is basically a "y"
sound before "ee" and "e" vowels and diphthongs (i.e., H, I, OI, U, E, AI), and a "gh"
sound elsewhere - i.e., before consonants and A, O - but this may be a bit simplistic.
This Webpage: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm says:
à = [ã] before back vowels [a, o, u]. Before front vowels [e, i], it is pronounced [ʝ] and transliterated y
The symbol used before front vowels for the "y" sound is the International Phonetic
Symbol that looks like a curly-tailed letter "j" - a fricative palatal:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm
(Note: the characters all display in Firefox; some of the unicode characters do not
display in Internet Explorer. I assume "front vowels" are those pronounced toward the
front of the mouth.)
In listening to Spiros Zodhiates' NT Greek CDs with the Modern Greek pronunciation,
as well as to the audio files here: http://www.helding.net/greeklatinaudio/greek/ (main
page: http://www.greeklatinaudio.com/), I notice that they often pronounce gamma
with a hard g/gh sound even before E and EI - e.g., forms of GINOMAI.
(Also: The greeklatinaudio mp3 files pronounce NT as "nt" - e.g., PANTES = "pantes"
- whereas Zodhiates pronounces it "nd" - i.e., "pandes" - as it is apparently supposed
to be pronounced.)
My Berlitz tape of Modern Greek seems to pronounce gamma as "y" as I noted above
- i.e., before "ee" and "e" sounds. When I recently attended a Greek Orthodox Church,
there was a mixture, but the priest attributed that to some of the non-Greeks in the
choir, and he basically agreed with the Berlitz pronunciation.
So, what is the correct Modern Greek pronunciation rule for gamma?
Eric S. Weiss
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