I am quite impressed with the pronunciation proposed by Luke Ranieri, but I wonder what historical evidence we have for the bilabial fricative in the consonant β and the diphthongs ευ and αυ. It may be helpful to quote in full:
Finally, we have the two false diphthongs; these consist of a vowel followed by a bilabial fricative. The bilabial fricative component is rounded, making this truly the intermediate point between the 5cBC Classical Attic αυ /au̯/, ευ /eu̞ ̯/ and Modern Greek /av, af/, /ev, ef/.
αυ /aβw, aɸw/ αὔριον, αὐτός ευ/eβ̞w, eɸ̞w/Εὐγενίᾱ, εὔτροπος
Note that the voiceless versions occur before voiceless consonants. These/aβw,aɸw/and /eβ̞w,eɸ̞w/sounds are very interesting to the ear.When spoken at
normals peed, a word like αὐτός/aɸwtós/̠ inLucian Pronunciation sounds at once like it could either be as old as 5cBC Classical Attic /au̯tós/̠ , or as evolved at Modern Greek /aftos/̠ . This has the effect of being recognisable and perfectly intelligible to users of any Ancient Greek pronunciation system. The letter combinations αυ and ευ are extremely common in Greek, so there current enunciation of /aβw,aɸw/and /eβ̞w,eɸ̞w/ in Lucian Pronunciation is a powerfully unifying force.
Here is how to reproduce them: make a voiceless bilabial fricative /aɸ/, and then do it again while rounding your lips as in /u/ when you get to the fricative: /aɸw/.
Further below, he cites the work by Horrocks Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. I do not have a copy, so I cannot vouch for the evidence he adduces. The argument certainly seems reasonable. I would be interested in hearing the opinions of other members of this board.
I think this stackexchange answer does a pretty good job of describing the historical evidence: https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/15822 Roughly speaking, I think the evidence from foreign transcriptions is that the “af” and “av” stuff dates to the CE, possibly fairly late in the CE.
In the materials I’ve seen by Ranieri, he’s pretty careful about distinguishing different time periods, and he’s always advocated picking a definite time and using that, rather than making up an artificial, standard, or non-time-specific pronunciation. That makes it surprising to me that in the quote you give, he seems to be taking the opposite position.
Ranieri has a chart here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fv46XgPPJy-ky9FUSApiemOVmtc8i6q7ZL5XkqtmMWA/edit#gid=1919026778 He seems to think the “af” and “av” stuff started to exist along side the “au” around the 3rd c. BCE and displaced it completely around the dawn of the CE. In general, I have a hard time believing that he has enough evidence to support the level of detail on the chart. But in any case the chart is a useful online resource that gives one fairly plausible point of view, from a very enthusiastic amateur.
It’s the prettiest sound of modern Greek, in my opinion, and one of the things that I enjoy most about hearing the Bible read with a modern Greek pronunciation.
On the other hand, it will mess you up in lines like this, if you have an interest in the poetry:
ὡς νεῖται Ὀδυσεύς· εὐαγγέλιον δέ μοι ἔστω
(But that could be fixed with something like an “evva-” or similar whenever it comes in front of a vowel. Though that will sound pretty different from the sound you are trying to copy from the modern language.)
And the softening of β and γ sounds nice to my ear, sort of like the soft gurgling effect you get with Portuguese. When I started learning ancient Greek after having done modern Greek, and switched reluctantly to a more ancient style of pronunciation, I really hated the sound of it at first.
I find it somewhat difficult to read aloud words like ἐκφευξόμεθα (Heb 2:3) if I try to pronounce ευ like ev; I wonder whether this is an objective difficulty or just some inability on my side. (And if I add the ph pronunciation to φ, words like this seem to be even more difficult to read aloud).
By the way, are there such combinations (…ευξ…) found in Modern Greek?
The first that comes to mind: https://forvo.com/search/Εύξεινος%20Πόντος/
Forvo is a great resource for modern language pronunciations.
Thank you; very helpful indeed…
I am now questioning my earlier enthusiasm for the Lucian pronunciation precisely because of certain awkward combinations of sounds. The example given by Vasile Stancu is not particularly difficult, as Joel shows. Modern Greeks would have no trouble with it. I’ve come across ναῦν a few times and I find it hard to believe it was pronounced like navn. I think my time would be far better spent attempting to master reconstructed pronunciation than experimenting with Ranieri’s system.