[B-Greek] Greek NT audio
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Sep 20 12:19:39 EDT 2008
David,
I too thank you for the post. To me the eta sounds like a short English e
as in pet. Randall would know better but I'm not sure there is any evidence
for eta being pronounced thus, and it is pretty distracting. Randall is
right about the accents Probably at least once in each verse he gets
it wrong. He routinely stresses hHMWN and hUMWN on the first
syllable for some reason.
But I've noticed this is universal in the Greek NT audio that
is available. Zondervan's c.d.'s by Jonathan Pennington are at least as
bad as this as far as missing the accents, and Pennington quite often
simply jumps around in pronouncing vowels, not because he is trying to
restore anything but because it is very hard to read Greek and not do
this. And John Dobson's c.d. from his Learning New Testament Greek is
simply awful. Dobson seems to arbitrarily mis-stress words over and
over again so often that you wonder if he knows something we don't.
The woman on the tape who reads it with him does a much better job
but she mis-stresses and mispronounces at least 10% of the time.
If any of us try to read Greek at all quickly we would do the same thing.
Randall is probably correct about the importance of getting the accents
right but I think stressing different syllables all the time is not natural
and makes reading and listening to Greek much harder. Sometimes I
think if we just decided to stress the last syllable as we do in Hebrew
except for a few marked exceptions to distinguish words
we would all be better off.
I would say that this new recording is the best I've heard. Usually women
read NT Greek better than men, but this is an exception.
If Randall is advising us to wait until we have more perfect NT Greek to
listen to I suspect we will be waiting a while. I think the best solution
is to record your own, very slow and then you can edit out obvious mistakes.
I listen to Pennington a lot while I am doing the dishes, despite all his
flaws. I know about the studies that stress the importance of audio
learning, but in my case I suspect that all my listening has not really
improved my Greek much.
Mark L.
--- On Wed, 9/17/08, Randall Buth <randallbuth at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Randall Buth <randallbuth at gmail.com>
Subject: [B-Greek] Greek NT audio
To: "David McKay" <davidmckay52 at gmail.com>, "greek B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2008, 10:19 AM
>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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