[B-Greek] Rules for Modern Greek pronunciation of gamma?
Jeremy Brightbill
jeremy.brightbill at gmail.com
Fri Sep 15 18:25:22 EDT 2006
I would just add, the recordings at www.greeklatinaudio.com were not
done by a native Greek speaker, so some of the sounds are not
pronounced consistently. I had noticed the same thing you mentioned,
that he often pronounces gamma more like a stop than a fricative. In
fact, a lot of his fricative sounds don't sound "fricative" enough.
He also doesn't follow the same intonation pattern that a native
Greek speaker would use.
If you want to hear more recordings of Modern Greek being spoken,
the Hellenic American Union has Podcasts online at http://www.hau.gr/
hau/en/services_mg_podcast.html.
Jeremy Brightbill
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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:17:37 -0700
From: "John Schwandt" <jschwandt at nsa.edu>
Subject: Re: [B-Greek] Rules for Modern Greek pronunciation of gamma?
To: "'Eric Weiss'" <papaweiss1 at yahoo.com>, "'b-greek'"
<b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <028901c6d8e2$765ddff0$6501a8c0 at Squirt>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
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:
? = [?] 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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