EDITOR'S NOTE: over a year and a half ago i was asked [by ian harbor, my student at purdue] about the details of pronouncing ancient greek -- or trying to do so in 21st-century america. i posted a response to ian
on this blog. my thoughtful student daphne kalomiris recently appended a comment to that post; but because it is so far back in the archives at this point, and because her question, i thought, deserved a detailed answer, i thought it worth creating a whole new post on the topic. i will begin here by citing her query, and then attempt an answer.
~~~~~ · ~~~~~So, I took a course of Ancient Greek a couple of semesters ago, and was very surprised to hear how foreign the language sounded to me, even though I speak modern Greek. As you obviously know, Ancient Greek is much more complex than modern Greek, but it uses the same alphabet, and there are many similarities in the vocabulary. I know you already covered the complexities of tonal emphasis and accents in the blog, but I'm just bringing up the topic of mere pronunciation. The Greek pronunciations I had to learn in that class made me cringe (by the way, the Greek version of the adage 'It's Greek to me' is 'It's Chinese to me', and that's just like what it sounded when we had to read passages aloud in class).
In Greece, they teach Ancient Greek with modern Greek pronunciation. So why is it that, at least in the United States, the pronunciation of certain vowels and diphthongs are so different? An example to make my point: I was taught in my Ancient Greek class that the letter upsilon was pronounced "oo", while all my life I've known it as a long "ee" sound. Also, the diphthong "oi" (omicron iota) should be pronounced as a long "ee", not "oi" as in "coin".
I asked my other professor the same question, but he retorted with something along the lines of, "They teach it wrong in Greece. We are teaching it the right way." What do you think of this discrepancy?hi daphne,
thanks for your very perceptive observations here. because you speak modern greek at a native level of fluency, you're better equipped than most of us, actually, to think deeply about the implications of any reconstruction of ancient greek pronunciation: you have, hard-wired into you, the sounds of how
modern greek is pronounced as a living language. and, btw, the first thing to be said is that that word
reconstruction is [alas] carefully chosen: we cannot do more than try to reconstruct what [we think] the language sounded like.
it's not that we are working with no evidence at all. on the contrary, as i
indicated in that earlier post, even the ancient authors comment sometimes on details of pronunciation. and the grammarians of later antiquity give us quite a bit of information, though, it has to be used with care. and sometimes even inscriptions on stone can offer some important evidence.
but all languages shift and change over time, in several respects: they change with respect to [1] their vocabulary; [2] their grammatical 'rules' [if that's not too prescriptive a word to label something that happens imperceptibly, day after day, year after year, like the waves lapping at the shoreline, and by very gradual cultural developments rather than by some sort of conscious decision on the part of the people speaking the language]; [3] their orthograpy; and [4] their pronunciation.
take a similar and, i think, analogous case to that of greek: italian. it's clear that modern-day italian is the direct descendant of classical latin, and not only because it is spoken by the direct lineal descendants of the ancient romans. and yet, italian has also demonstrably changed in the first three ways listed above, and i think also the fourth [though i also surmise that classical latin, if we could hop into a time machine and go back to cicero's day, probably sounded a lot more like modern italian that most people think].
now. back to your questions about greek. one important transformation that has demonstrably occurred in the greek language, between [say] plato's day and our own, is a shift of pronunciation, known as
IOTACISM: the tendency to pronunce a whole group of [related] vowels and diphthongs the way you would pronounce
iota [english 'ee' as in 'feet']. this group includes eta, upsilon, alpha/iota, epsilon/iota, eta/iota, omicron/iota, and of course iota itself. in other words, the development of iotacism was a process of
simplification -- of co-opting one single vowel-sound to do the work of several others.
if i'm not mistaken, this shift toward 'iotacism' was already beginning in the byzantine period. certainly before what we think of as 'modern greek' was in place. [my daughter, who's about to finish her PhD in linguistics, writes:
Linguist's note: this is called a "merger" in historical lingo. That is, several previously distinct phonemes "merge" into one sound, such that you lose what was a previous distinction in pronunciation (i.e. you have a net loss of distinct phonemes in the language's phonological inventory).]
so you can see why classicists, who work very hard to recuperate tiny tidbits of precious long-lost information, might get frustrated when they perceive those tidbits as vanishing once again. with all the mass of learning that classics has gathered over the centuries, in many ways we still know very very little about the ancient world.
languages change over
time. they also change according to
place: consider how differently the word 'half' is pronounced in boston and in memphis and in chicago. it appears that some ancient greek-speakers pronounced
zeta as /sd/, whereas others pronounced it as /dz/. so which of those should we teach our students? moreover, which gets to be designated 'most authentic'?
language can be an index of
class or of
caste. george bernard shaw's brilliant play PYGMALION is essentially about this [and, thus, so also is lerner and loewe's MY FAIR LADY, which was based on that play]. people often tend to judge you based on the way you speak -- not just your grammar and vocabulary, but also your very pronunciation. i think this is why jimmy carter, who had always had a thick georgia accent, began elocution lessons as soon as he became president. by the end of his tenure the accent was almost gone.
literary authors don't always demonstrate an awareness of this; a notable exception is mark twain, who actually tried to represent the various dialects of his characters in the way the words are spelt. ancient writers seem to have paid very little attention to this, though an important early exception can be found in the ANTIGONE of sophocles: early in the play, the guard who comes to tell creon about the violation of his law speaks in greek that is clearly different [and evidently less aristocratic] than creon's. but if you asked a modern linguistics scholar, which of them is more 'genuine' or 'correct' ancient greek?, she would likely say: they're equally authentic, equally idiomatic, and thus equally genuine and correct. a century ago, one might choose to label creon's greek as more 'standard' than the guard's, but to do so today is a sociopolitical gesture laden with implications that can no longer be ignored.
language is also, in some important respects, an index of
hegemony. as with matters of class and caste, this is an issue of
power. consider the case of today's
people's republic of china, which has decreed that the mandarin dialect --
putonghua or 'common speech' as they call it -- shall be the 'official' national language for all the people. this despite [and because of] the many many dialects spoken across china that are mutually unintelligible. [the people of
taiwan, who can speak a language virtually identical to putonghua, nonetheless refer to it as
guoyu -- 'national language.' this in itself is clearly a political gesture -- an implicit rejection of the hegemony, linguistic or otherwise, that the PRC would love to exert over taiwan.
these issues of standardization [and perhaps of hegemony] are relevant to the teaching of ancient greek as well: much of the literature that people want to read in ancient greek is composed in the
attic dialect, the version spoken in and around athens. plato, aristotle, thucydides, demosthenes, the playwrights, all wrote in attic greek. but to read pindar, or the choral odes in the plays, one must understand the doric dialect [the version spoken around sparta]. which of these is, or could be considered, the more 'standard' dialect of greek? or, to put the question more pragmatically for an educator: which dialogue should we teach the student
first? one has to start somewhere.
many [not all] classicists would reply 'attic greek,' partly because they want to begin the student on
prose rather than on verse, and there is so much important greek prose composed in the attic dialect. but the notion of attic greek as 'standard' is also, inevitably, tied up with the fact that many [not least the athenians themselves] saw fifth-century athens as the zenith of hellenic culture. indeed thucydides's pericles refers to athens as the 'school of hellas': he admonishes the athenians to think of themselves explicitly as cultural examples for the rest of the greek-speaking world.
so: do we follow that example and begin by teaching our students attic greek? my professors did. i first learnt to spell the word for 'sea'
thalatta, like a good athenian, despite the fact that everywhere else, greek speakers said
thalassa. and so on. i was taught all the vowel contractions that are idiomatic to attic greek; this made for a major wake-up call when it came time for me to try and read herodotus, who wrote not in attic but in ionic greek. [not to mention homer, whose greek text contains elements not only of ionic, but also of mycenaean, corinthian, aeolic, arcado-cypriot, and, yes, attic!] but attic was taught us as the 'default' dialect, and still is in most classics departments. as i have said, one has to start somewhere: but would we be closer to the fact of the matter if we made it clear from the beginning that attic greek is only one of a whole palette of dialects used across the greek-speaking world? as soon as we do that, of course, the task of discovering the 'correct' ancient pronunciation for anything becomes that much more complex.
as pronunciation varied across the ancient world, and as modern languages are pronounced variously across the modern world, so it should probably not surprise us that ancient languages are pronounced variously in different cultures today. listen to an italian choir singing in mediaeval latin, and you will hear distinct differences between their pronunciation and that of a german choir singing the same text. should we be terribly surprised that the pronunciation of ancient greek is taught differently in the US, in germany [where e.g. they pronounce the greek word 'europa' as if it had a german diphthong in the first syllable], and in greece itself?
with each passing year i become more and more reluctant to speak dogmatically on such matters. there is clearly so much that we do not know or understand, even apart from the issues mentioned above. but to say 'in greece they teach it wrong' is, i fear, a very simplistic assessment: on the contrary, greeks in greece today have some very cogent reasons for teaching the pronunciation of classical greek the way they do. they have a historical reason, i.e. the heritage of a very long linguistic phenomenon [see above on IOTACISM] that links modern
demotike directly to ancient greek, via the byzantine tradition. they have geographical and genetic reasons: they are themselves the lineal descendants of the ancient greeks, and live on the very soil that was cherished by the ancients. and they have, because of all this, what we might call an emotional reason: to invoke again the analogy i drew above, modern greeks are to ancient hellas as modern italians are to ancient rome. how can anyone discount the combined weight of these factors?
i do not know who your other teachers were, and i do not mean to contradict or impugn them. but i would emphasize again that the best we can do is
attempt to
reconstruct a model of ancient pronunciation. [and i would note too that nobody who is not also at least attempting to speak ancient greek
tonally can claim to be even possibly 'right' about it. classical greek, like modern
putonghua in china, was spoken tonally, and those 'accent marks' we see on the page are meant to convey not stress-accent, but
tone -- i.e. they are more akin in music to a
melodic score than to a
percussion score. unless we are demanding that our students learn this as well -- and the vast majority of classics department in the US do not -- we would do well not claim that we have cornered the market on correctness.
another detail, as a side note: whoever said that upsilon was pronounced 'oo' in ancient greece, was very likely mistaken. in fact it was probably something closer to the french sound of 'u,' or the german 'ΓΌ' with umlaut. one way to try and make this sound is to position your mouth as if you were going to say 'oo,' but then try to say 'ee.'
this is, i fear, rather a complicated answer to what you probably thought was a straightforward question; i am sorry the response could not be more simple. someday, maybe, we will be able to offer a more substantive solution to what remains a very mysterious conundrum in the study of the ancient world. but at the moment, we remain very considerably in the realm of speculation on these matters.
