Every time i heard a scholar say εἶναι, the infinitive of the verb ‘to be’, i cringed, my ears hurt. It just sounded so foreign to me… (i was raised speaking an ancient dialect of the Greek language called Cypriot).
When i’d tell them politely ‘you know, it’s not pronounced like that’, they’d respond, almost condescendingly, ‘well, that’s how it was actually pronounced 2000 years ago!’. I don’t have a recording of how Greek sounded around the Mediterranean 2000 ago, so i guess the experts are right, right?!
The experts were wrong for the last 500 years! We do know now. See this .
Benjamin Kantor provided evidence to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt what the native speakers maintained all along, what common sense maintained all along. But how? Did he find a recording of spoken Greek from two millennia ago?
Turns out there’s another way. You know how in English we spell ‘luv’ and we really mean ‘love’? Benjamin found a whole bunch of these misspellings and presented statistics which map pronunciation across space and time, which are hard to not believe.
Sometimes native Greek speakers feel a translation is wrong. People say ‘but we have dictionaries’. But maybe, just maybe, the collective knowledge and experience of a peoples accumulated over the last couple of millennia does carry some wisdom, even in the presence of dictionaries!
Tsiappoutas wrote:
“Every time i heard a scholar say εἶναι, the infinitive of the verb ‘to be’, i cringed, my ears hurt. It just sounded so foreign to me… (i was raised speaking an ancient dialect of the Greek language called Cypriot).
When i’d tell them politely ‘you know, it’s not pronounced like that’, they’d respond, almost condescendingly, ‘well, that’s how it was actually pronounced 2000 years ago!’. I don’t have a recording of how Greek sounded around the Mediterranean 2000 ago, so i guess the experts are right, right?!
The experts were wrong for the last 500 years!”
Interesting video and topic.
Do I understand his claim to be that NT Greek was pronounced more like Modern Greek is today than the Erasmian pronunciation?
Robert wrote:
“I’m not sure any works of the New Testament were actually written in Palestine. I imagine that koine pronunciation varied a great deal among various ethnic groups and geographic areas.”
There had to be a wide variety of different pronunciations. If we look at Modern Greek, there are clear differences in how a native speaker in let’s say Macedonia, Crete, and Cyprus sounds. As a native speaker of English, my Greek pronunciation is different not only from native speakers of Greek but other non-native speakers of other languages (e.g. Albanian, Bulgarian, etc.).
Robert said:
Personally, I don’t have a strongly preferred system of pronunciation but I am interested in adopting one for oral communication and have started looking at a few different options.
I agree with adapting a pronunciation system that allows one to orally communicate. Unfortunately, the Erasmian would only facilitate communication with Western scholars of Greek, not Greek scholars of Greek.
BJH1960 said:
Do I understand his claim to be that NT Greek was pronounced more like Modern Greek is today than the Erasmian pronunciation?
That’s my understanding of it, yes.
In Modern Greek, η, ι, υ, ει, οι, and υι all have the long “ee” sound.
I got Kantor’s Short Pronunciation Guide and hope to get started on it fairly soon. If I am able to make sense of it, and I’ll be the first to admit phonology has never been my strong suit, I’ll be sure to share what I’ve discovered.
Robert said:
I don’t speak modern Greek (or Cypriot), but doesn’t modern Greek tend to merge a lot of vowel and dipthongs into a single long “ee” sound, thus eliminating what presumably must have been various differing pronunciations in ancient Greek dialects?
The commonly accepted theory is that very ancient Greek must have pronounced the diphthongs as two separate letters and in time as one letter. The orthography of the word did not change, however, so as to show where/how the word originated.
Then question is when did the diphthongs stopped being pronounced as two letters/sounds/vowels (and only as one)? It seems that by the time of Jesus, the old pronunciation was long forgotten. Some say, even in the Hellenistic classical period (ca. 4th BCE) it was not there. So modern with 1st century CE pronunciation should be much more alike than Homeric.
I’m not an expert on this at all, just sharing the little i’ve picked up over the years… Benjamin should know better, but i did not have the time to read his books.
BJH1960 said:
In Modern Greek, η, ι, υ, ει, οι, and υι all have the long “ee” sound.
yes, i agree, but i wouldn’t call it a long /ee/ sounds, just an /ee/ sound. The long and short pronunciations had to do with prosody, which i think were not in use at the time of Jesus.
BJH1960 said:
I got Kantor’s Short Pronunciation Guide and hope to get started on it fairly soon. If I am able to make sense of it, and I’ll be the first to admit phonology has never been my strong suit, I’ll be sure to share what I’ve discovered.
I’d appreciate it, if you do! I checked out an e-copy through my local library, but it’s been sitting there for a couple of weeks and no time to read it!
I’m in a few chapters.
Until around the 15th century, Greek had always been taught using the pronunciation of native speakers. Obviously, this is no longer the case. What changed?
Knowledge of Greek had pretty much dried up in Western Europe by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It wasn’t until Constantinople fell that one saw an influx of Byzantine scholars into Italy, and there was a revival of interest. Both students and scholars noticed a difference between the native pronunciation (Byzantine Greek) and the ancient texts they were studying. The reconstructed versions also came about at least in part because of the notion that the “purity” of the language had been corrupted. They didn’t accept a linguistic continuity between the ancient and modern speakers.
Kantor’s focus is on Judeo-Palestinian Koine Greek. However, he does have an explanatory “Around the Mediterranean” box where he talks about how the pronunciation might have differed elsewhere. He suggests further studies in different locales (e.g. Italy, Asia Minor, etc.) are needed so as to get a better picture of all the varieties present in NT times.
I just started Chapter 4, which is the real meat of the book. Here he’s breaking down exactly what sounds were used in the Judeo-Palestinian variety as well as around the Mediterranean, so it’s going to be a lot slower going.
I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to summarize it, but I will give it a try.
In Chapter 4, Kantor has a section on consonants, diphthongs, and vowels. I finished with the individual consonants (not the consonant clusters).
He uses the IPA notation:
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For Modern Greek I used this:
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How different are the individual consonants between Judeo-Palestinian Greek (JPG) and Modern Greek (MG)?
With the exception of β and φ, all the consonants are pronounced the same.
The shift that took place probably happened during the Byzantine period.
β
JPG: (IPA /β/)
MG: (IPA /v/)
φ
JPG: (IPA /ɸ/)
MG: (IPA /f/)
There isn’t a great difference between these sounds (have a listen!). He suggests that if students have trouble pronouncing these sounds in JPG to use the MG pronunciation instead.
How did the individual consonants sound around the Mediterranean?
Sometimes there’s not enough evidence to say one way or the other.
In general, they seem to have been pronounced the same as in JPG. A few exceptions include β, θ, and δ.
Vowels is where it really starts to get interesting.
In fact, I think it’s safe to say they were the driving force behind questioning using the Greek spoken by native speakers.
The problem can be seen most clearly in the pronunciation of ι, η, υ, ει, οι, and υι, which were pronounced as IPA /i/.
The Byzantine Greek scholar, Maximos Planoudes, noted the following words were all pronounced in the same way:
ἐρήμην ‘by default’
ἐροίμην ‘I would ask’
αἱρεῖ μιν ‘he will seize him’
αἱροίμην ‘I would choose’
ἐρεῖ μιν ‘he will say it’
αἰροίμην ‘I would lift’
ἐρρίμμην ‘I had been thrown’
In JPG α, αι, ε, ι, ο, ου, and ω, were pronounced in the same way as they are now in MG.
The differences between JPG and MG are:
η
JPG: (IPA /e/).
MG: (IPA /i/)
υ, oi, υι
JPG: (IPA /y/).
MG: (IPA /i/)
Around the Mediterranean, ει might have been pronounced as long /iː/ οr without length /i/ depending on the register.
Most speakers probably pronounced η as /eː/ or /e/.
Hopefully, I’ve given a good general picture of the similarities and differences between how JPG and MG are pronounced.
They are remarkably similar and not just in pronunciation.
In fact, so much so that in the above video, never having learned NT Greek, I can understand something like 70% of what he says.
If anyone has any questions about any particular letter combinations I haven’t covered, I’d be happy to look them up.
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