[B-Greek] "proper" pronunciation?
Vasile Stancu
vstancu at clicknet.ro
Tue Jan 16 14:53:58 EST 2007
I believe that any language which is in use at any time is bound to
continuously undergo changes of various natures. Perhaps the best way to
understand what happened with the Greek language (especially when it
became fairly universal) is to look at the English language and its
transformations today. More and more people speak English today, as more
and more people came to speeking Greek in the helenistic period. As for
English, there is already a saying which reads, "the most widely spoken
language in the world is Broken English". I can see samples of reforged
English phonetics and grammar every day, but I am sure that those who
are native English speakers know a lot more than I do about that (I am
Romanian, by the way). Can we imagine researchers two thousand years
from now, trying to reconstruct the phonetic system of the English
language of our day? What would they discover if they base their
research mainly on the tendencies that were in place at that time? I
have just found a website where a certain Professor William Labov (who,
by the way, is the author of the "Atlas of North American English
Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change") who has something to say about
the shift of vowel sounds in some parts of the US.
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090). And I
would be not very surprised to discover that many of such changes are
already reflected in certain peices of writing of our day.
There have been, no doubt, a wide range of transformations of the Greek
language over time, otherwise we would not have the modern language of
today, as different from the language of Homer. However, more important
- before we decide which pronounciation system to employ when engaging
into the study of Greek - would be to consider whether it is really
useful to apply the modern pronounciation (in natural use with its
corresponding language of today) to an ancient language which is
obviously different from its modern counterpart? Why create unnecessary
confusions and diminish to some extent the precision of expression the
ancient language had? Why have our audience exchange confused glances
when we read in front of them TI hOUTOS hOUTWS LALEI? (Mk 2:7) Just for
the sake of forcing O to sound like W as seems to have been the tendency
of that time? (By the way, modern Greeks have appealed to a nonliteral
translation of the verse, showing thus to me that they may not have in
their language today all the instruments that would allow them to
preserve the same vigour of the ancient text). And if I go further back
in time, I find a poet describing the sound sheep make using the words
BH, BH. The modern Greeks would pronounce that somewhat like "vih, vih".
I believe this would be quite strange to anybody to accept. Yes, someone
may say, "but that is classical Greek and we are dealing now with the
koine". Indeed, but incidentally we are dealing with the phonetics of a
language which - at least in writing - seems to be lot closer to the
classical, rather than the modern Greek. (I am quite sure that modern
Greek would spell the sound of sheep quite differently today in order to
be properly pronounced).
My opinion is that, if we have to choose between a higher standard and a
lower one, we should choose the higher; and this is really a matter of
choice. And the higher would be, I believe, to appeal to what was
before, rather than after, the altering tendencies became common ground.
Vasile STANCU,
Timisoara,
ROMANIA
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list