Mike Aubrey June 27, 2019 Greek

Mark 3 in Koine Greek, The LUMO Project

The third chapter of the LUMO Project’s film narrated in a reconstructed Historical Koine Pronunciation is now available on YouTube:

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1

Angelos Tsirimokos on October 11, 2019 at 12:41 pm
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I was very curious, as a Greek, to hear your rendition of first-century Koine. To me it sounded just like modern Greek with a slight foreign accent, and I had no difficulty following it by ear. When I paid more careful attention, I noticed that:
= υ and οι are pronounced as French u, which we know for certain to have been the case during the first millennium A.D.
= η is sounded now as e and now as i; is this deliberate? is there a criterion?
= the reader seems to lay some stress on articles, which are completely stressless (proclitic) nowadays. Of course, the fact that (except for ὁ and ἡ) they all bore accents may indicate that they were not so completely stressless back then!
= I was also startled by the reader’s attempt to stress enclisis after properispomena (as in το σῶμά μου). Ι can’t imagine such stress surviving after the disappearance of distinctions of length and prosodic accent.

If you ever want a reading of a Biblical passage as if it were modern Greek (the way it would be read in church when not chanted), I shall be happy to oblige!
- 2
  
  Mike Aubrey on December 22, 2019 at 1:09 pm
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  Hi Angelos, I somehow did your comment here until today.
  
  η gained its modern pronunciation [i] at some point between the 2nd century and 4th century CE.
  I think the pronunciation of clitics and the sentence accent/prosodic system generally, is probably the weakest point in terms of our knowledge of the Koine period. There hasn’t been any substantial study of the topic for this period of the language.