[B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
James Ernest
JErnest at BakerPublishingGroup.com
Tue Dec 15 07:44:04 EST 2009
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 3:31 AM, Vasile STANCU <stancu at mail.dnttm.ro> wrote:
> I believe anybody who engages in such entreprise has the choice of
> following
> the original accents or apply some other system.
>
The third option, evidently, is not to have a system at all--i.e., ignore
the accents entirely and emphasize syllables randomly. This practice is
encouraged by the proliferation of public-domain e-texts that use no
diacritics and I think is not uncommonly followed in seminaries and Bible
colleges. I think it might even be standard-US-"Erasmian" practice. I.e.,
the Robinson recordings (apart from the textual basis) will sound exactly
right to students and teachers in many of our institutions.
Here's my question: would Erasmus recognize this sort of US "Erasmian"
pronunciation as Erasmian at all? How did Erasmus pronounce omicron? And did
he accent syllables? Were his consonants and vowels drawn from the Dutch
sound system of his day, or the Italian, or of whatever sound system
scholars of his day used in Latin?
The Erasmian pronunciation in Christophe Rico's recordings is at least as
different from Robinson-type US "Erasmian" as Randall Buth's reconstructed
first-century koine is from Rico's Erasmian. To me, US "Erasmian" usually
just sounds like American speakers of English reading transliterated Greek
text as if it were simply English--i.e., not a foreign language, but unknown
English words that use exactly the same phonetic repertoire as the reader's
own subdialect of American English, and accented as each individual guesses
each word might be accented if it were English.
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James D. Ernest, PhD, Editor
Baker Academic & Brazos Press
jernest at BakerPublishingGroup.com / http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com
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