[B-Greek] BH BH, the bleating of an ancient sheep

Tom Moore tom at katabiblon.com
Thu Jul 16 23:05:31 EDT 2009


Mitch,

Harry Foundalis quotes that text on his Modern Greek site:

"In general, the second letter of the alphabet, beta, was pronounced as [b] in Plato’s time, but was changed to [v] by the time the Gospels were written.... Greek readers of this text who do not believe that Plato, Socrates, etc., were sounding so barbaric, may take a clue from this very word: “barbaros” was coined after somebody who, as a non-native speaker of Greek would produce incomprehensible speech, which sounded like... well, what? Could it be “var-var-var”? Wouldn’t it sound more barbaric if it were “bar-bar-bar”? Besides this word, direct evidence for beta comes from a fragment of Attic comedy where it is said that the voice of the sheep is BH-BH.(4)

"(4). Cratinus, in Dionysalexandros:
ὁ δ’ ἠλίθιος ὣσπερ πρόβατον βῆ βῆ λέγων βαδίζει:
the fool goes about like a sheep saying “ba ba”."

http://www.foundalis.com/lan/grkalpha.htm

Regards,
Tom Moore

>  -------Original Message-------
>  From: Mitch Larramore <mitchlarramore at yahoo.com>
>  Subject: [B-Greek] BH BH, the bleating of an ancient sheep
>  Sent: Jul 17 '09 02:03
>  
>  
>  To demonstrate that ancient Greek writers did NOT pronounce Greek as the Moderns do (at least in some cases), a text was sighted which described the sound sheep make. The ancient (comedy) writer identified, so it was argued, the sound of a sheep as BH BH (bah, bah). Modern Greeks of course would pronounce BH BH 'vee vee.' Does anybody know the whereabouts of that particular ancient text, if it exists at all? Seems to me the guy who originally put forth this argument did not actually quote the ancient text, which made me a bit leery. However, if this text actually exists, I suppose that would settle the pronunciation question to some extent.
>  
>  
>  Mitch Larramore
>  Sugar Land, Texas
>  
>  
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