[B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Dec 19 17:35:27 EST 2009
James E. wrote:
<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.>
Hi James,
Yes, but you say this like it were a bad thing.
When Yiddish speakers say Hebrew words
they accent them on the first syllable, as if they were
German words. They don’t care whether their language
sounds like a foreign language or not. Of course, there is no
such a thing as a foreign language. As Prospero said to Miranda,
“Tis new, to thee.”
Robinson is not the first to ignore the accent
rules when speaking Greek. Dobson does this
on his audio. It’s not something I would choose
to do, but since the Greek accents as they are
taught are (a) one of the Top Ten Reasons
why Greek is so hard and (b) not really how
ancient Greek was ever spoken, anyway,
I can’t complain about abandoning them.
When you really speak Koine, you cannot help
but doing this to some extent, if you want to
speak fast and not think about every darn
word you are saying and place the emphasis
according to the meaning not according to
rules that are very difficult to master.
Niko A. wrote (of the MG audio on Greek-Latin audio.com)
<Although the voice is still not natural>
This is why I think this issue is so complicated. Niko, of course,
is a native Greek, and he feels that even Koine
spoken in Modern Greek is not natural.
Say that the Greek is ugly or unhelpful to me.
Say that I would choose to pronounce it differently.
But let a thousand flowers bloom. Anything spoken
by anybody is by definition natural to somebody.
Mark L
FWSFOROS MARKOS
--- On Tue, 12/15/09, James Ernest <JErnest at BakerPublishingGroup.com> wrote:
From: James Ernest <JErnest at BakerPublishingGroup.com>
Subject: [B-Greek] "Erasmian?" really? WAS: Another Audio Greek New Testament, free on the Internet
To: "B-Greek" <B-Greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 5:44 AM
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.
------------------------------
James D. Ernest, PhD, Editor
Baker Academic & Brazos Press
jernest at BakerPublishingGroup.com / http://www.BakerPublishingGroup.com
------------------------------
---
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