[B-Greek] Greek NT audio

Randall Buth randallbuth at gmail.com
Wed Sep 17 12:19:55 EDT 2008


>G'day folks.
I've discovered a new readign of the Greek NT, but so far only Matthew is
finished.
See http://www.davidpfield.com/audio-gnt/Gospels-Acts/Gospels-Acts.htm
I'd be interested in what you think of the pronunciation and quality of
reading.
David McKay>


Thank you very much. I enjoy listening to readings of texts. I applaud the
reader's efforts to do these recordings and put them on the web, though
the following notes suggest that this may be a good time to consider
revision and practice before further recordings.

For the first moments I thought it might be a mixed
Restored Attic//Erasmian where he was trying to pronounce length
of vowels (a pre-Koine Greek feature) and tones, but it quickly became
apparent that the reader was just ignoring the accents.

Eg. in Matt 5, first three verses the following words were mis-accented:
5:1 ANEBH TO OROS AYTOY AYTW
5:2 AYTOYS LEGWN
5:3 PTWXOI AYTWN TWN OYRANWN

On letter/sound matchings, the HTA is low, like restored Attic 'ae' [a in cat]
At first I thought that this was on purpose in order to distinguish EI but
some EI were read 'ae', too.
Ypsilon is like "ou" rather than like German "ue".
W=O much of the time. That is correct for the KOINH, and avoids the
unspeakable vice of the southern US.
Fei and Theta were soft (fricatives), like North-Aegean Koine//Byzantine,
but inconsistently, X, B, D, G, were hard stops. P, T, K are frequently
aspirated, which is against the restored Attic and history of Greek.

Wondering if he improved over time, I also jumped to Matt 28 for a listen.
The following words were misaccented in the first 4 verses:
1. OPSE,
2. IDOY, SEISMOS, OYRANOY, PROSELQWN, AYTOY
3. AYTOY, ENDYMA, AYTOY, LEYKON, XIWN
4. APO, AYTOY, NEKROI.

Finally, I had to stop listening. It has taken me too long to clean up my
own Greek and to correctly accent words when I speak. Listening to the
concatenation of misaccentuations were more than distracting.

One of the things that I have learned while speaking Greek is the importance
of the accent for the overall word shape and for understanding flowing
speech. When the accent is off, one's ears do not correctly break up the
words, communication fails. The same thing happens today in Greece.
If you misaccent a word communication will often fail. And vocabulary is
harder to remember with multiple misaccents, and the GRAMMAR is
miscommunicated when accents don't shift according to the Greek.
It is easier to recognize a correctly accented word with an incorrect vowel,
than to recognize a mis-accented word with the correct vowel.

It is good to listen to Greek, but it needs to be correctly read. I don't mind
listening to a well-read restored-Attic poem, even enjoy it for a change of
pace. Of course, restored Attic (which this reading is not), is the wrong
dialect for Koine.
Yes, I would advise anyone who undertakes the arduous task of fixing
their ears and language after years of bad habits to consider the
KOINH PROSFORA notes on our website ('courses', 'Greek demo').
But even more importantly, everyone needs to get started.
For that the reader is a sterling example and should receive KUDOS
(OK that's not a very KOINH word, either. It's Epic Greek.)

ERRWSQE
IWANHS

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



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