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Modern Greek pronunciation added to SPEAK function


gpence

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In Greece, among Greeks, and in Greek Orthodox liturgies the koine Greek of the New Testament is pronounced just as everyday modern Greek is pronounced. Native Greek speakers pronounce the Greek of all ages in the same way they converse with one another today. At this site you can hear a native Greek speaker reading the ancient language as his own living language:

 

https://www.youversion.com/bible/209/jhn.1.ntpt

 

Some of us use modern Greek pronunciation in our teaching of biblical Greek. With the Speak function in Accordance it would be wonderful if modern Greek pronunciation were included as an option alongside the Erasmian academic pronunciation that it offers now. When I create Greek-English vocabulary flash cards on Quizlet,com, the software will pronounce the Greek with modern pronunciation. Why not in Accordance?

 

I wonder how many of you would agree with that suggestion.

 

 

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  • 7 months later...

This sounds so simple to do, but in fact it would be very complicated. In Accordance we are still using our own (beautiful) ASCII fonts. In order to get Accordance to read our Greek and Hebrew we had to program the correct sound for each character combination in each font. This is why it is far from perfect. Yes, we could program another pronunciation for Greek, IF any of us knew modern Greek, but we don't. We cannot piggyback on Apple's programming which reads the Unicode fonts directly, at least not until our texts themselves are fully Unicode which is not on the horizon.

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  • 1 year later...

Hard to do, maybe, but offering the "modern" pronunciation strikes me as an absolute must! 

The iotization (as it's called) of Greek took place sometime between the LXX and the NT, according to Helmut Koester (find the ref somewhere in his Intro to the NT, vol. 1). 

 

That means, the "modern" pronunciation was what *Jesus and Paul* would have been familiar with, and what they *used*. 

It's time biblical scholars, including Accordance's fine folks, stopped pretending that the Greeks didn't know how to pronounce their own language until Erasmus came along!

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