[B-Greek] Online teaching tools

Sarah Madden sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
Sat Dec 8 09:28:02 EST 2007


to Carl Conrad--
My comment was purely regarding reading out loud (not about transliterating
text into an e-mail -- that would be for another series of comments). For
example, when a student or even a professor reads out loud during class, and
he is not consistent in pronunciation, it makes me cringe, and sometimes
it's hard to even know what word he meant! These people may not even be
familiar with the B-Greek list and how to transliterate Greek in this
fashion vs. using UTF-8 characters; it is their pronunciation that is
inconsistent.  (Sidebar re. the UTF-8, I don't even know how to use it or
where that font is.)

to Eric Inman--
Re. your comment about the "sounds" of modern (or Koine) Greek. You are
absolutely right that they sound wonderful and fluid (I have heard NT
texts read using the modern pronunciation)! One person I know has learned
how to read NT Greek texts with both types of pronunciations (the Erasmian
so he can be understand by professors and fellow students, and the modern --
possibly authentic -- so he can enjoy a very "Greeky" sound). Another
student, whom I tutor and mentor in NT Greek, has a strong background in
modern Greek because of her family background and having lived in Greece,
yet is struggling with how to spell the words or with a word's grammatical
function -- precisely because the non-Erasmian pronunciation she is used to
hearing and saying does not help her with grammar or word spelling -- and
the modern pronunciation certainly isn't helping her with learning the
vocabulary.

--Sarah Madden



On Dec 8, 2007 8:09 AM, Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:

>
> On Dec 8, 2007, at 7:34 AM, Sarah Madden wrote:
>
> > While we're on the subject of pronunciation, I wonder why some
> > people -- even if they are trying to use Erasmian pronunciation --
> > don't always remember to distinguish the sounds, say, between a
> > "xi" (14th letter) and a "chi" (22nd letter) -- I have heard learned
> > people pronounce the "chi" (as in "ARCH" - "beginning") like "KS" --
> > this is more like an English pronunciation of an English "x" in
> > "axiom" and this destroys any difference between the two Greek
> > letters. In addition, I can only imagine that this casual reading
> > method makes it very difficult to remember vocabulary words since
> > one would have to simultaneously juggle several pronunciations in
> > one's head to equal the one word.
> >
> > This is what I have noticed for that particular letter (chi), when
> > certain persons would read, say, Jn 1:1a -- EN ARCH EIN hO LOGOS ,,,
> >
> > Erasmian pronunciation: "en arkhay ane ho logos"
> > Slightly incorrect Erasmian pronunciation: "en arksay ane ho logos"
>
> I think this derives in part from the fact that the printed Greek Chi
> looks like a printed Roman "X" -- and in part from the fact that Greek-
> font keyboard configurations are inconsistent, some of them using the
> Roman "X" for Chi, others using the Roman "C." Add to that the fact
> that some people insist on assimilating their B-Greek transliteration
> scheme to the keyboard they're using (most people do write "C" for Chi
> and "X" for Xi, but a few write "X" for Chi and "C" for Xi. But we
> can't yet move over to Unicode Greek altogether because quite a few
> list-members still have trouble configuring their text-encoding to
> represent UTF-8 Greek characters.
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
>



-- 
Sarah
sarah.r.madden at gmail.com
work: 301.429.8189



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