> Nevertheless, I have found that trying to convince non-Greeks to
>abandon Erasmus' pseudo-pronounciation in favor of (gasp!) Greek
>pronounciation is extremely difficult. If they only knew how silly they
>sounded, things would be different (an American friend of mine quoted
>the Lord's prayer to me, using Erasmus's pronounciation, and I just
>about died laughing!). Anyway, its getting late. Bye.
While I have had some words of opposition to some of Isidoros' comments
about the similarity of Modern Greek to koine (if I'm understanding him
correctly), I feel that I should point out that I have always used Modern
Greek *pronunciation* when teaching Greek. While it does make learning the
spelling more difficult, I agree with Dean Theophilou and Isidoros that
there are distinct advantages to using the Modern Greek pronunciation.
In fact, I wrote some rather lengthy defenses of Modern pronunciation some
time ago on this list. I'm sure they are buried somewhere in the archives,
so I won't rewrite them here.
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Micheal W. Palmer
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College
mwpalmer@earthlink.net
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