[B-Greek] Rules for Modern Greek pronunciation of gamma?

John Schwandt jschwandt at nsa.edu
Fri Sep 15 12:17:37 EDT 2006


Eric,

The following is adapted from some material that I produced for my students.
I'm sure a good portion of it is remedial.

What I have learned from Modern Greek text books, my trips to Greece and
Greek language courses in Greece is that Gamma has two sounds.  The first is
exactly like the English 'y' as in year.  This is convenient since the two
symbols look similar.  Gamma only has this sound when it precedes letters
that produce /i/ sounds (as in keep) or /e/ sounds (as in pet).  Note that
these sounds may not correspond with ‘e’ shaped letters (e.g. U has /i/
sound in the Modern Greek system.  Here is a nice list of /i/ and /e/
sounding letters, AI, E, EI, H, I, OI, U, UI).

The second sound is somewhere between the English hard ‘g’ (as in gum) and
‘y’ (as in year).  Notice that the only difference for the mechanics of the
throat to produce these two sounds is the position of the tongue to the
throat.  For ‘y’ the tongue stays away from the throat, but for ‘g’ it
touches and briefly seals off the airflow.  Because the air stops I call
this sound the hard ‘g’.  The Greek Gamma does not have such a hard sound.
The tongue moves up as if to touch the throat but doesn't.  The mechanics
are the same for gargling water or for gurgling like a baby.  In order to
gargle the tongue cannot shut off the throat, but it must remain close or
else you will choke on whatever is being gargled.  Thus to make the sound of
Gamma preceding any other sound than /i/ or /e/ sounds gargle it, but remove
the bubbling action.  If the sound goes through your nose, that is fine.

In rapid speech there is plenty of flexibility here.  Sometimes the tongue
will hit the throat and make the /g/ sound other times it ends up closer to
a /y/ sound.  But to the extent you get it right the better your Greek
accent will be.  Gamma and Rho are the two letters I most focused upon to
reduce my American accent when in Greece.

Blessings,
John Schwandt
www.biblicalgreek.org



-----Original Message-----
From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Eric Weiss
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 8:12 AM
To: b-greek
Subject: [B-Greek] Rules for Modern Greek pronunciation of gamma?

>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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