Arche Selevkia

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Originally Posted by Barnabas

My Koine professors used the Erasmian pronunciation, though some speculate that Erasmus was told how to pronounce Koine Greek incorrectly (apparently as a joke by his fellow Humanists, though I am uncertain if they would have let him publish that joke). In reality, we have no certain way of knowing how Koine is pronounced, but everyone I know uses the Erasmian pronunciation as well (though with a "Southern" twang, given where I live). :laugh4:

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Even my Attic professors use the Erasmian pronunciation. Of course, I imagine my own pronunciation has quite a bit of twang in practice, as well, given that I'm from Georgia (at school in Massachusetts). I somehow doubt that that "legend" about Erasmus' "education" is true, but it's certainly amusing. Oh, those crazy humanists.

Cheers.

I'm a bit baffled about the eta-pronunciation. We pronounced (using Erasmian Greek) it like the German long "e" (or something between "e" and "ä"), which is not like in "say" but more a bit like in "air". Therefore the eta in Latin letters is nearly always written as "e", not as "ei" (like in "say").

The epsilon + ypsilon combination in "Sel e u keia" is common for example in German to, but as "e" and "u", pronounced like "oi", not like "e - u".
We would have pronounced "Ar - chä Se - loi - kei - a" ("kei" like in "say").

Air but with a somewhat prolonged -ai- sound is pretty much what I tried to describe earlier. If you want to know: there's this line in my sig from an Attic comedy.

"The fool goes about saying Be Be like a sheep." ~;)