From: Trevor Peterson (speederson@erols.com)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 19:35:06 EST
You may have noticed not long ago that I initiated a brief discussion
about Modern Greek. If you didn't read the postings in that thread, it
might be worth checking back in the archives. I say this not because I
had any great things to contribute to the issue; I was mainly asking
questions. But there were some good remarks on both Modern Greek and
early Koine Greek, as alternative pronunciation systems to that normally
used in scholarly circles. If memory serves correctly, I believe it is
fairly widely accepted that both Modern Greek and NT-era Koine would have
similar pronunciations for AI and E. As has already been mentioned, the
time and place can make a significant difference on issues of this sort,
and in a sense there's something of a two-way street. We try to infer
vocalizations from variant spellings in texts, but we also try to explain
textual variants in light of vocalizations. The fact that there are
tangible differences between Modern, living Greek and much of what we know
about older forms at least helps us to support the general trend of
changing pronunciation in the language. But we'd certainly be a lot
better off if we had audio recordings from period in question :-) So the
long and short is that we all have to make a decision and pick the way
we're going to pronounce the words for ourselves, but just make sure you
allow for differences in various periods that sometimes give themselves
away in the mistakes scribes made.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
> Denny Diehl here
>
> In a discussion of a textual variant at Lk 22:40,
> it is suggested that the reason for having the
> variation of: PROSEUCESQAI and PROSEUCESQE
> is that the diphthong AI and the vowel E are
> pronounced the same. Really? I was under
> the impression that
>
> AI had a long I sound, and
> E had a short E sound.
>
> Which is correct?
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