How should ancient Greek morphemes be pronounced? According to Brooks and Winbery's book on morphology, there are at least 4 principal ways to pronounce Greek phonemes/morphemes. Moreover, one Gifford Fellow at the University of Glasgow, who was completing his doctoral work at Cambridge University when I resided in the UK, told me that Cambridge (UK) has its own distinct way to pronounce Latin and Greek words. His statement accords with what I've studied about ancient Greek and Latin phonology wherein books delineate how those in Great Britain traditionally have articulated Latin or Greek. So this subject opens a can of worms to be sure.
None of us can be sure how ancient Greek words were or should be pronounced. Some argue that modern Greek vocalization is pretty close to the ancient while others vigorously dispute the claim. At any rate, I'm not always consistent in my pronunciation of omega. Sometimes I pronounce it as an English long "o" (as in "go") and other times I say "aw" as in the English "saw" or "law." See Donald Mastronarde's Intro to Attic Greek, p. 12.
In ANTILUTRON (1 Timothy 2:6, I once stated that the iota could be either long or short, depending on the Greek accent; however, I would now urge readers to pronounce it with long "i" although some might demur from my suggestion. But the upsilon should probably be pronounced like a long/short French or German "u."
Okay, let the beating commence.
This subject is out of my league, but I did find this interesting:-
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ibiblio.org/bgreek/forum/viewtopic.php?t=235
I can see that Randall Buth was involved in that particular BGreek thread. When I used to participate and read BGreek, I recall many comments by Buth about the work he was doing in conversation Greek. I even acquired a proto-CD of his reading Greek in his reconstructed system. As the thread noted, there's also Erasmian pronunciation and other schemes for pronouncing Greek words. Chrys Caragounis also wrote a tome detailing some of these issues and outlined his own preferences. See https://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2005-July/035129.html
ReplyDeleteDonald Mastronarde's suggestions for pronouncing Attic Greek: http://atticgreek.org/pronunc/pronunc_guide.html
ReplyDeleteSee also http://www.triviumpursuit.com/articles/comparison_of_greek_pronunciation_systems.php