Pronounciation of Certain Consonants, Vowels, and Dipthongs

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dmlscholar
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Pronounciation of Certain Consonants, Vowels, and Dipthongs

Post by dmlscholar »

I have just started to learn greek and was wondering about the pronounciations of some letters. First, I will ask about vowels. The textbook I am using distinguishes between short and long vowels, but it does not say how those vowels are pronounced. For example. it distinguishes how a short α versus a long α would be notated, but not how each would be pronounced. I need some help with most all of the vowels on this matter. Also, there were some consonants whose pronounciations I was uncertain of. They are the ones that end with an i sound (ξ, π, φ, χ, and ψ). For example, is π is pronounced pee, or is it prounonced pie, like I have always pronounced it in math class. Lastly I have a question about the dipthongs ευ, and υι. My textbook says ευ is pronounced eh-oo. Does this sound like the latin word for Alas (Eheu)? Thanks to anyone who can help.

modus.irrealis
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Re: Pronounciation of Certain Consonants, Vowels, and Diptho

Post by modus.irrealis »

Good luck with learning Greek. For your questions, a long vowel, basically, takes longer to say than a short vowel -- in the case of α, both short and long have the same pronunciation (the same quality) but long α should be pronounced for a longer period of time (they differ in quantity).

About those letter names, the pie pronunciation is a result of the history of English and has little to do with Greek, where it would have been pronounced roughly like pee (the ι in πι was long).

For ευ, if I understand right what the Latin pronunciation was, then yes. As for υι, it's basically the sound of υ (French u or German ü) gliding into the sound ι, just like οι is the sound of ο gliding into ι.

Hopefully that helps.

GlottalGreekGeek
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Post by GlottalGreekGeek »

In the reconstructed pronounciation (which is the one I use, though most classics deparments in the U.S. use Erasmian, and modern Greeks use modern Greek pronounciation) π is pronounced like the 'pee' in 'speed' rather than the English word 'pee'. The difference is that the 'pee' in 'speed' is unaspirated, whereas the 'pee' in 'pee' is aspirated. If you want more clarification on this issue, look at

http://www.textkit.com/tutorials/200312 ... id=2&tid=5

EDIT : modus.irrealis is right about long/short vowels

Amadeus
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Post by Amadeus »

What about φ and θ? My book says these consonants were pronounced like ph and th of up-hill, ant-hill, i.e., distinctly. But that's horrible! There's just no way one can be fluid in οφθαλμός. My theory is that φ and θ were pronounced like the English p and t, with a little air escaping at the end, sorta like puh-leez. No? :oops:
Lisa: Relax?! I can't relax! Nor can I yield, relent, or... Only two synonyms? Oh my God! I'm losing my perspicacity! Aaaaa!

Homer: Well it's always in the last place you look.

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Post by Bert »

Amadeus wrote:What about φ and θ? My book says these consonants were pronounced like ph and th of up-hill, ant-hill, i.e., distinctly.
Instead of up-hill and ant-hill it should be uphill and anthill. Then you get exactly what you said:
sorta like puh-leez

modus.irrealis
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Post by modus.irrealis »

Thanks to GlottalGreekGeek for the correction on πι -- I was thinking solely about the vowel and didn't even think of the consonant (although maybe I should try hiding behind my "roughly" :)?).

For θ, I've never liked the "ant-hill" or "anthill" type explanations either, because, the way I at least pronounce them, there are clearly two consonants, a "t" that ends one syllable and an "h" that starts the next (I pronounce "anthill" much differently from "until," which does have an aspirated "t"). With "puh-leez" though, I have a small vowel after the "p", so that doesn't work for me either. And the way I pronounce the Greek is not really similar to "please" either, just because I aspirate the Greek consonants a lot more than I do the English, although this might just be my compensating for the fact that I'm not accustomed to making a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants. Now I wonder if anyone else does that, I mean the heavy aspiration?

And about the φθ combinations, I've finally managed to produce something that does sound like I'm aspirating both consonants, so I've now stuck to that, but does anyone else try it that way?

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Post by GlottalGreekGeek »

I have no problem pronouncing the φθ cluster - even without any vowels. And Ancient Greek does have words like φθογγή. However, I have the advantages of a) being a native English speaker (English has more heavily aspirated consonants than most of the Romance languages, so it's easier to feel the difference, and English is so very fond of consonant clusters) b) having had some live phonetics training with a teacher who could critique my pronounciation. If you don't have enough to do with your busy life, looking for a live phonetics class might be a good idea - even one session can help a lot. And not just for classical pronounciation - people in everyday life will be able to understand you easier too!

euphony
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Post by euphony »

Surely there exists a page somewhere on the web with mp3 files detailing the pronunciation of ancient Greek. Has anyone come across such a page?

Amadeus
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Post by Amadeus »

modus.irrealis wrote:(I pronounce "anthill" much differently from "until," which does have an aspirated "t"). With "puh-leez" though, I have a small vowel after the "p", so that doesn't work for me either.
You are right! "Until" does have an aspirated t. I'm gonna stick with this "t". As regards, "puh-leez", you don't necessarily have to have a vowel after "p", at least I don't. To me it's just a "p" with a lot of wind :!:.
GlottalGreekGeek wrote:I have the advantages of a) being a native English speaker (English has more heavily aspirated consonants than most of the Romance languages, so it's easier to feel the difference, and English is so very fond of consonant clusters) b) [...] looking for a live phonetics class might be a good idea - even one session can help a lot. And not just for classical pronounciation - people in everyday life will be able to understand you easier too!
Well I'm not a native English speaker, but I certainly notice the difference between aspirated consonants and non-aspirated consonants. In fact, that's how you know you have a foreign accent, when you can't distinguish between the two. Anyway, thanks for the phonetics class suggestion. Perhaps it will benefit me: I tend to speak too fast and put the words in the wrong order, pretty embarrassing cause you sound like talking gibberish. :x
Lisa: Relax?! I can't relax! Nor can I yield, relent, or... Only two synonyms? Oh my God! I'm losing my perspicacity! Aaaaa!

Homer: Well it's always in the last place you look.

Bert
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Post by Bert »

Amadeus wrote:
modus.irrealis wrote:(I pronounce "anthill" much differently from "until," which does have an aspirated "t"). With "puh-leez" though, I have a small vowel after the "p", so that doesn't work for me either.
You are right! "Until" does have an aspirated t. I'm gonna stick with this "t". As regards, "puh-leez", you don't necessarily have to have a vowel after "p", at least I don't. To me it's just a "p" with a lot of wind :!:.
At the risk of appearing stubborn, I am still saying that "anthill" is aspirated while "until" is not (or hardly aspirated.)
If you call the latter aspirated I challenge you to pronounce that word without the aspiration.

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Post by Amadeus »

Bert wrote:At the risk of appearing stubborn, I am still saying that "anthill" is aspirated while "until" is not (or hardly aspirated.)
If you call the latter aspirated I challenge you to pronounce that word without the aspiration.
Yes, you are stubborn!!! (Just kidding)

You can ask any native Spanish speaker (who doesn't know any English) how to pronounce "until" (antil) and I am pretty sure you'll hear a non-aspirated "t" in every case. Now, I challenge you to pronounce οφθαλμός with the uphill/anthill rule (in Spanish apjil/antjil). :wink:
Lisa: Relax?! I can't relax! Nor can I yield, relent, or... Only two synonyms? Oh my God! I'm losing my perspicacity! Aaaaa!

Homer: Well it's always in the last place you look.

modus.irrealis
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Post by modus.irrealis »

Oddly enough, I thought my being a native English speaker was the reason I couldn't distinguish aspirated and non-aspirated consonants, since I think of it as having been trained to think of the aspirated t in top as the "same" sound as the non-aspirated t in stop (although you could always feel something was wrong when people didn't aspirate the right consonants, like amadeus says about foreign accents, but I never knew what it was until I learned about these things). I still can't hear the difference consistently, so in my pronunciation of ancient Greek, I really aspirate my consonants (where appropriate of course), which is what I think amadeus is saying with puh-leez.

About anthill vs. until, to use phonetic symbols, I have [th] in anthill and [tʰ] in until, so 2 vs. 1 consonant. And I know until has an aspirated t using the simplest test I've seen, where I just hold my hand in front of my mouth and see if I can feel the puff of air. And it's not too hard to pronounce without aspiration, especially since that's what you need to do to pronounce τ (and in fact, once I learned what was going on in English, one of the ways I mimic my mother's non-native pronunciation of English is to deaspirate all the consonants).

But the live phonetics class idea is a good one -- I've read a bunch of books on phonetics and listened to some samples, and that's helped a lot, so something more interactive should be even better.
Last edited by modus.irrealis on Thu Nov 16, 2006 3:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

Bert
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Post by Bert »

Amadeus wrote: Now, I challenge you to pronounce οφθαλμός with the uphill/anthill rule (in Spanish apjil/antjil). :wink:
Touche. :o
modus.irrealis wrote: And I know until has an aspirated t using the simplest test I've seen, where I just hold my hand in front of my mouth and see if I can feel the puff of air. And it's not too hard to pronounce without aspiration,...
Maybe I need this phonetics training. I can't pronounce it without any aspiration. I seem to end up with "undil."

GlottalGreekGeek
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Post by GlottalGreekGeek »

The 't' in until is certainly aspirated in my dialect of English, and I have no problem deaspirating it.

Thinking about phonetics made me go through a bunch of tongue twisters out loud, including one of the hardest tongue twisters I know, which happens to be my username. I could repeat "GlottalGreekGeek" three times rapidly before it desentigrated into "GrottalGeekGeek", but my voice is cold and I have a cough. I wonder how I'd do if my voice were warm and healthy.

modus.irrealis
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Post by modus.irrealis »

Bert wrote:Maybe I need this phonetics training. I can't pronounce it without any aspiration. I seem to end up with "undil."
It's very possible that you are pronouncing it without any aspiration but you're hearing it as being voiced, without it actually being voiced. One thing you might try is saying "still" a bunch of times and then dropping the "s" but keeping the rest exactly the same -- the result will sound different from both till and dill.

aso
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Post by aso »

try "optics." the "p" isn't aspirated, but it can be: you'll just have a slightly more forceful puff of air in between the "p" and "t" sounds. then you've got "ophthalmos."

for anglophones, an initial unaspirated voiceless consonant can sound like a voiced consonant (because those aren't aspirated). the sounds are very close. russian has good, unaspirated voiceless initial consonants, if you want some reference. in indian languages the unaspirated voiceless stops are very soft, but there's no confusion because the voiced stops are, in contrast, pretty heavy (the "voiced aspirates" are less aspirated than murmured). because the voiceless unaspirated stops are so soft, it's easy to tell them apart from the voiceless aspirates.

maybe this is a bad compromise, but i tend to pronounce the greek aspirates really exaggerated, just because it's hard for me (as an anglophone) to deaspirate my initial t's, d's, and k's.

dmlscholar
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Post by dmlscholar »

Forgive me for my inexperience, but in reading the past few replies to this topic I have become lost. I am not sure what is meant by the term "aspirated consonant". I have only been learning greek for a very short time. A while back I was studying greek breathing marks, and learned that a rough breathing indicates and aspirated vowel. My textbook says that to aspirate a vowel, you simply pronounce is with an h sound at the beginning. I would appreciate it if someone would explain the meaning of an aspirated consonant. Also, euphony asked about web pages that had greek pronounciations. No one replied, and I guess that means no one knows of any. That gave me an idea. Most of you explain greek pronounciations with english words. It is possible that people can pronounce common english words differently. Why don't some of you load audio files with your personal pronounciations of greek onto the web and provide a link to them in a post? Just and idea.

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Post by spiphany »

dmlscholar wrote:Also, euphony asked about web pages that had greek pronounciations. No one replied, and I guess that means no one knows of any
Actually, there are several:
http://www.rhapsodes.fll.vt.edu/Greek.htm
http://turdpolish.com/greeklessons.html
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ancgreek/ ... start.html
dmlscholar wrote:I would appreciate it if someone would explain the meaning of an aspirated consonant
An aspirated consonant is accompanied by a puff of air -- if you hold your hand in front of your mouth and say a word like 'pen,' you should be able to feel it. Hearing it may be harder, since aspiration isn't contrastive in English; it's conditioned by the other sounds around it. You can compare the 'p' in 'pen' with the one in 'spin,' where it is not aspirated.
IPHIGENIE: Kann uns zum Vaterland die Fremde werden?
ARKAS: Und dir ist fremd das Vaterland geworden.
IPHIGENIE: Das ist's, warum mein blutend Herz nicht heilt.
(Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris)

GlottalGreekGeek
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Post by GlottalGreekGeek »

I'd also like to point out the page I linked to earlier in this thread, Annis' consonants tutorial. It doesn't have audio, but it does give good explanations of what the beep we are talking about.

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