Greek linguistic geekery

Erasmus by Holbien the Younger

This is a bit of linguistic geekery. When I first went to seminary, I was taught to read and pronounce the Greek of the first century, called koine Greek. However, I later found out that the pronunciation I was taught is called Erasmian. That pronunciation does not actually come from Greece, but from Europe. Erasmus could read Greek, but did not actually know how it was pronounced back in Jesus’ time. His assumption was that every letter would be pronounced. That is, his assumption was that in the word “koine” the K-O-I-N-E are all pronounced. However, in modern Greek, the word is pronounced more like K-I-N-I.

Now Erasmus’ assumptions were not unfounded. He did much work in classical Greek, looking at clues like misspellings, transliterations, onomatopoeia, etc. However, the problem is that the Greek of Jesus’ time was no longer classical. When Alexander the Great began invading everybody, he unwittingly began a change in the pronunciation of Greek. As his armies went into different countries, and people of differing language bases began to use Greek, the language, and its pronunciation, simplified from classical towards what we find in Byzantine, and then Modern Greek. But, do we have any clues that this is so?

Actually, we do have one interesting clue that says that the “i” sound did begin to take over the pronunciation of several of the diphtongs and vowels. That clue is in the Western liturgy. In the Greek liturgy, the most frequent response in the litanies is “Kυριε ελεησον”. That phrase is adopted into the Petrine liturgy. But, it was not translated, rather it was transliterated. This is important in that a transliteration normally tries to preserve the original pronunciation. So, when we see a transliteration, we normally see an attempt to preserve the original pronunciation in the letters (phonemes) of another language.

That phrase, “Kυριε ελεησον” comes into the Petrine liturgy as Kyrie eleison. Notice that the “Ï…” has become a “y”–that is actually pronounced as an i–and the “η” has also become an i. The dipthongs are still preserved, in this case, but the evidence is present that the i sound has begun to take over several of the other sounds. This shows us that the pronunciation of koine Greek is closer to that of modern Greek than to Erasmus’ reconstruction.

And that is your Greek linguistic geekery for today.