[B-Greek] Greek NT Audio
Kevin Riley
klriley at alphalink.com.au
Sun Oct 5 20:13:02 EDT 2008
I have been contemplating this question of learning Greek and the issue of
pronunciation by modern Greek speakers. I asked a simple question - why do
teachers of Old English spend so much time on teaching the correct
pronunciation while teachers of Shakespearean literature don't bother at all
in many cases. The answer is also simple: you can read Shakespeare with a
modern English pronunciation and ( as long as you pay attention to the
markéd é's) you can read the text aloud and understand and be understood.
You cannot read Old English as if it were modern English - it is just too
foreign. Chaucer is somewhere in between, but you can read most of it with
a modern English pronunciation and it will be meaningful. For Greeks,
reading anything back to the Classical period is like reading Shakespeare or
the KJV in modern English. We are aware of the old-fashioned grammar and
obsolete words, but it still feels like English. What do Greeks do with
Homer - is it, like Chaucer, near enough not to matter, and also, like
Chaucer, rarely read by the masses anyway? What do the Greeks do with
Mycenaean Greek? Does that work like OE and force a rethink of reading as
if it were modern? Perhaps it doesn't matter, as, apart from its historical
interest, there is no literature worth reading in Mycenaean Greek anyway :)
What would most of us - those who are native speakers of English - think if
the Chinese or Arabs (or Greeks :) or whoever) decided that Shakespeare and
other Elizabethan/Jacobean literature must be read with the "correct"
pronunciation in order to be understood fully? Or would we buy their
argument that the correct pronunciation is closer to the spelling and helps
to remember how to spell a word when they (and we) do not actually write any
literature beyond grammar exercises?
I first entered this discussion a few years ago firmly convinced that it was
best to learn classical Greek with the restored Attic pronunciation, and
therefore, by extension, it made sense to apply the same pronunciation to
Koiné. Now I find myself asking "apart from the issue of Attic poetry,
where length (and perhaps rhyme, although that is not usually disturbed by
the modern pronunciation) is of some importance, what benefit do we gain by
not using modern pronunciation - apart from a sense of some academic
superiority in knowing we pronounce ancient Greek 'correctly'?". And "does
any advantage outweigh any disadvantages?".
Kevin Riley
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