A.T.Robertson wrote:VI. Pronunciation in the Κοινή.
This is indeed a knotty problem and has been the occasion of fierce controversy. When the Byzantine scholars revived the study of Greek in Italy, they
introduced, of course, their own pronunciation as well as their own spelling. But English-speaking people know that spelling is not a safe guide in pronunciation, for the pronunciation may change very much when the spelling remains the same. Writing is originally an effort to represent the sound and is more or less
successful, but the comparison of Homer with modern Greek is a fruitful subject.
Roger Bacon, as Reuchlin two centuries later, adopted the Byzantine pronunciation. Reuchlin, who introduced Greek to the further West, studied in Italy and passed on the Byzantine pronunciation. Erasmus is indirectly responsible for the current pronunciation of ancient Greek, for the Byzantine scholars pronounced ancient and modern alike. Jannaris quotes the story of Voss, a Dutch scholar (1577-1649), as to how Erasmus heard some learned Greeks pronounce Greek in a very different way from the Byzantine custom. Erasmus published a discussion between a lion and a bear entitled
De Recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione, which made such an impression that those who accepted the ideas advanced in this book were called Erasmians and the rest Reuchlinians.
As a matter of fact, however, Engel has shown that Erasmus merely wrote a literary squib to "take off" the new non-Byzantine pronunciation, though he was taken seriously by many. Dr. Caspar Rene Gregory writes me (May 6, 1912) : "The philologians were of course down on Engel and sided gladly
with Blass. It was much easier to go on with the totally impossible pronunciation that they used than to change it." Cf.
Engel, Die Aussprachen des Griechischen, 1887. In 1542 Stephen Gardiner, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, "issued an edict for his university, in which, e.g. it was categorically forbidden to distinguish at from ε, ει and οι from ι in pronunciation, under penalty of expulsion from the Senate, exclusion from the attainment of a degree, rustication for students, and domestic chastisement for boys!" though the continental pronunciation of Greek and Latin was "Erasmian," at Cambridge and Oxford the Reuchlinian influence prevailed, though with local modifications.
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