It’s ill-advised for a non-Greek learning ancient Greek to erase so many functional phonetic and phonemic vowel distinctions. Only Greeks do that it’s not so very perverse for them since they’re only applying their native phonology to an earlier stage of their language. To learn ancient Greek with a modern Greek pronunciation is perverse and will only confuse you, as bedwere indicated. You can learn modern Greek or you can learn ancient Greek (or best of all, both, as Timothée says). This is due to how katharevusa was used and what kind of connotations using it has. (Something like that.)ĭisadvantages? If you try to pronounce Modern Greek in the Ancient Greek way in Greece, you may be taken as a supporter of the junta. All poetry will cease to work (in the meter). With modern pronunciation you will lose all the grasp of poetic metre. I find it immensely hard to believe that an Englishman who has no linguistic education would argue with a foreign scholar of Old English about how Bēowulf reads and what it actually means. I really do not wish to speak ill of Greeks, and my words above shall be read only in the context of linguistics amongst non-linguist Greeks. They might be very reluctant to admit that pronunciation could have changed over the centuries and millennia. They will say poetic things such as foreign people cannot understand Ancient Greek (let alone modern) because they have not been nurtured by the Greek soil and climate, even though they may only have superficial understanding of the ancient variety. The academe of Greece is somewhat foreign to me, but I know that many non-academic Greeks have primaevally and primitively fanciful ideas of language. Knowing Modern Greek adds to the understanding of Ancient Greek a little, so if you have the strength, do teach yourself both. I cannot at all recommend pronouncing Ancient Greek the modern way. I have listened to a number of hours of modern Greek, but I'm not sure if I'm 100% correct on the above list. I think that we need to add the non-graphically distinct doubtful vowels α/ι/υ, which were either long or short. You can sort of live with it in the Koine because of the prepositions everywhere, but it strikes me as something that would make Attic much harder.Īlso, what precisely is the list of conflated sounds? Starting with bedwere's: ι ει υ οι η ῃ αι. So even if you read silently, and your brain is doing something related to aural processing behind the scenes, the modern Greek confusion could affect comprehension (and probably does).

I'd actually recommend the modern fricative pronunciation for θφχ for that reason (although I believe that even in modern times there have been regions of Greece that had an aspirated pronunciation for some of them). I had a lot of trouble distinguishing words with φ and π for about a year because I wasn't very good at pronouncing them differently (I try to use the aspirated).

Indeed, so distorted were their features that, save for his black beard and stout figure, we might have failed to recognise in one of them the Greek interpreter who had parted from us only a few hours before at the Diogenes Club.I wonder if it doesn't affect your silent reading as well. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men. (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)įrom year’s end to year’s end he takes no other exercise, and is seen nowhere else, except only in the Diogenes Club, which is just opposite his rooms. (His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) His Pall Mall lodgings, the Diogenes Club, Whitehall-that is his cycle.

Diogenes pronunciation english