[B-Greek] Pronunciation of Biblical Greek

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Jul 18 09:24:16 EDT 2009


On Jul 17, 2009, at 8:11 PM, Oun Kwon wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 7:58 PM, Mark  
> Lightman<lightmanmark at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> <clipped>
>>
>> I agree and frankly I don't understand why so many
>> list members whom I respect so much can't seem
>> to apply this tolerance to Erasmianism.  A pronunciation,
>> any pronunciation, is neither right nor wrong, but simply
>> there, like your life.
>>
>>
>> Mark L
>>
>
> Yeah,
>
> whether it is artificial/unnatural or not, I believe it will survive
> as an easy-to-get-on Erasminian dialect for some population. ;-)

There is no danger that the pronunciation attributed to Erasmus will  
obsolesce. After all, a sheep knows one big thing: how to defend  
Erasmus (i.e. the so-called Erasmian pronunciation). And with all due  
respect, Biblical Greek pedagogy is a big sheep, a PROBATON that may  
occasionally take one step forward, but generally at the pace of a  
glacier before the onset of global warming.

I grimace when I see the recurrent discussion of Biblical Greek  
pronunciation endlessly regenerated like the mythical hydra. The same  
opinions have been restated repeatedly  and attacked by others with  
the same fervor. The only constant seems to be the agreement that we  
need to voice the words of the texts we are studying if we are to  
discern in them more meaning than we might find in a printed page of  
sequences of numerical digits. I don't think that a discussion of  
Biblical Greek pronunciation has been squelched, however obnoxious it  
may have become; fiercely-contending opinions have been expressed, but  
the boundaries of civility seem at least minimally to have been  
observed.

Eddie Mishoe has noted that discussions of the pronunciation of  
Biblical Greek on the TC List have been as serious as those on B-Greek  
have been frivolous. One might be tempted to think that if this topic  
is discussed so frequently and so fervently on B-Greek, then there  
must be real changes imminent in how the pronunciation of Biblical  
Greek is taught in schools and seminaries. But it is patently false  
that any real changes are imminent in how the pronunciation of  
Biblical Greek is taught in schools and seminaries. It would be  
difficult to exaggerate the profound conservatism of Biblical Greek  
pedagogy. So far as I can see, the only real ferment in the  
theoretical study of Biblical Greek in the last half century or more  
has been in the matter of verbal aspect -- and, to be honest, despite  
the best efforts of Porter and Fanning and McKay and Olsen and  
Campbell and even Zondervan's publication of a primer on Biblical  
Greek Verbal Aspect, I don't believe that Aspect Theory has had any  
real -- significant -- impact on the way most readers of Biblical  
Greek texts interpret those texts. Classical Greek pedagogy, on the  
other hand,  has been significantly impacted by the efforts of Allen  
and others to reconstruct the actual sounds of ancient Greek in the  
era of the literature of focus.

I personally think that by far the most significant transformation in  
Biblical Greek pedagogy in recent decades has been the virtual  
abandonment of the objective learning to read Greek as an internal  
process, Technology has played a key role in that transformation by  
making it ever easier to rely upon predigested and mediated  
understandings of a cadre of professional Biblical Greek scholars. But  
that's another story and my recurrent statements about it probably are  
as welcome to others as the ebb-and-flow of discussions of Biblical  
Greek pronunciation are to me. "I should have been a pair of ragged  
claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)





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