[B-Greek] Greek intonation

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Thu Jan 29 04:50:50 EST 2009


> I am teaching myself Greek and have finally worked my way through John Wenham's >The Elements of New Testament Greek<. A characteristic of this book is that it does not teach us how to stress the vocabulary, so that until now I have been doing it based on my English intuition. I've decided that I would like to make this language more "my own," which means - for me - learning modern pronunciation and the proper intonation.

> In short, can anyone point me to resources which explain the stress patterns in Greek? Where are they characteristically found and how do they shift? Also, is modern Greek intonation the same as Biblical?

> Thanks in advance.

> Philip Sumpter>

I have come to the conclusion, especially in the last decade of 35 years+ of
Greek, that stress patterns are very important for the proper handling
of the language.
In real communication stress (high tone) was one of the main signals that
distinguished different words. Stress position is a major factor in
modern Greek
communication and the wrong stress will produce wrong words and confusion.
In addition, ignoring stress position is a contributing factor that prevents
fluency, causes extra 'analysis' when trying to think or speak, and
that adds to
the difficulty of those who would want to control the language fluently.

What should a student do? Listening to correctly stressed speech is vital.
Get recordings with properly and fluently read texts. Living Koine
Greek can get
you started.

ERRWSO 'be well'
Randall



--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth at gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life



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