Pronunciation Guide for Bible Names & Places

[Bautts]

Does Accordance publish any pronunciation guides for Bible names & places? I have found some help in the pronunciation guides built into Holman Bible Dictionary and Unger's Bible Dictionary, but haven't found any resources dedicated to helping us pronounce Bible names and places correctly. I don't find the audio files in Accordance very helpful for this. I have used Pronouncing Bible Names by W. Murray Severance and That's Easy for You to Say: Your Quick Guide to Pronouncing Bible Names by W. Murray Severance and Terry W. Eddinger for many years and have found them very helpful. The Exhaustive Dictionary of Bible Names by Judson Cornwall and Stelman Smith is also fairly helpful. Does Accordance have any resources like this?

 

Pastor Paul Bautts

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Paul,

I have never heard of these books, next time I am at my seminary’s library I will have a look. I’d like to see their philosophy of name pronunciation.

 

Having said that, I think that it’s a little bit of a difficult area really, since pronunciation is often a matter of opinion. The English names of various Biblical people and places is not always (often) similar to the OL pronunciation, so where are we to take the pronunciation from? The name Jesus is just a case in point off the top of my head. In terms of Greek, the name Jesus (spelt and pronounced like that) did not exist, it came from the Greek Ἰησοῦς (pronounced in Erasmian Greek as yair-soos, others with more modern views of how to pronounce koine Greek would sa yee-soos) via the latin Iesus which then gained a J sound at the beginning when it came into English. And Ἰησοῦς actually is some sort of Greek transliteration of יְהוֹשׁוּעַ (Eng yeshua, which we pronounce Joshua - go figure!) So, while in this case, 500+ years of usage makes the decision a little simpler, it is not always straightforward what the pronunciation should (f there is such a way of speaking here) or could be.

 

Another example is Jerusalem, which pronounced a little more closely to the original would be yairooshahlie-eem or yairooshahliem or even yairooshahlarmy - depending on which Hebrew spelling/pronunciation system you use. None of which sound a whole lot like our word Jerusalem. You can clearly hear the similarity, but they also are clearly not the same.

 

Many of us grew up with a version of the AV that syllabised and accented names, in order to help us pronounce what was written in the English text. And that is very helpful but to think that that is helping us to "pronounce Bible names and places correctly” is not quite right. It may ease our difficulties and allow for some uniformity of pronunciation, which is of course a good thing.

 

Just as an aside, I have heard Jesus pronounced so many different ways that sometimes it takes me a moment to realise who is being talked about, and occasionally his blessed name sounds like the plural of a curdled dairy product, and I find that quite distracting, so lets uniformise! *Australian pronunciation please as we don’t have any accent at all!

 

Having said all that, if you want to see roughly how the original name may have sounded, the key dictionaries (Mounce Greek and K-M Hebrew) all have transliterations which can help.

 

So - in ESVS if I triple click on the name Jesus, Mounce’s Dictionary opens and you see Ἰησοῦς Iēsous - the second being the transliteration to aid in pronunciation.

 

Other than that I am not aware of any resource like that that we have.

Edited November 24, 2014 by Ken Simpson

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

Hm. I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing to implement such kind of resources. While neat to have on par with having the Biblical texts read aloud by native speakers of Modern Greek and Hebrew, neither will ever provide the historically correct pronunciation seeing that Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew are dead languages.

*EDIT*

..And Ken beat me to it

Edited November 24, 2014 by Pchris

[Lester P. Bagley]

With apologies to Ken, the only correction that needs to be noted is that Australian (Aussie, pronounced "Ozzie" for you American's) accent is almost neutral. Just let any Kiwi help you, mate!

[Ken Simpson]

With apologies to Ken, the only correction that needs to be noted is that Australian (Aussie, pronounced "Ozzie" for you American's) accent is almost neutral. Just let any Kiwi help you, mate!

 

Despite your minor inaccuracy - truly neutral - it is nice to have antipodean phonetic support!

Edited November 25, 2014 by Ken Simpson