In the name David, as written in Koine, how do you pronounce the u? It is spelled Dauid.
Intuitively that would be v because it’s a loanword, but Google INSISTS Biblical Greek has no v. The letter u morphed into half the universe before anyone ever thought of v.
And how about u in uios as in son or descendant? Like a w or a v?
Thanks!
Dora
If you check https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLbiwlm3poGNh5XSVlXBkGA, the guy there has a lot of videos on the history of Greek and Latin pronunciation, so if you look around you might find something (he mentions a chart listing all the changes somewhere if I recall).
My personal guess would be that it depends on the time - earlier (300BC ish), I suspect D-AW-id, but by 100bc-100ad, more like D-AwV-id, and then D-AV-id.
However, I have no idea what the ancient did when it came to loanwords, my guess is just based on the little I know about the evolution of Greek pronunciation, and is at any rate probably wrong.
This also comes down to the development of the pronunciation of Hebrew, which originally had the letter ו (vav) as a /w/ sound, and not a /v/ sound (it also had an /o/ sound too depending on its place in words).
So depending on the Hebrew, the Greek transliteration of the letter in question could be either υ, ο, ω ου, or ωυ.
Thus with David, it can be either plene (full) spelling: דָּויד; or defective: דָּוִד ; originally the middle vav/waw here was likely a /w/ sound, which then also developed into a /v/ sound at a later point in the Hebrew language pronunciation.
With the use of υ followed ι, I would expect the original pronunciation of Δαυιδ to have been Da-wiyd (similarly pointed out by Andriko above).
This of course was then replaced in later Greek by Δαβιδ, where the β has now replaced the υ with the /v/ sound, and corresponded more with the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation of ו as /v/ and now /w/.
In Δαυιδ the υ would have been consonantalized, as something approximating our letter v or a soft b.
υιός in early koine tended to be pronounced more like υος, with the υι reduced to the simple vowel, but it could also become three syllables.
(Written independently of other posters but posted only now,. I don’t think the Hebrew pronunciation is particularly relevant,)
Idle and unscientific observation: It’s interesting that the w sound (what’s it called? bilabial approximant?) seems to be quite unstable and underwent parallel developments to a consonantal v sound (labiodental continuant?) in Greek diphthongs, Latin/Romance, Hebrew (apart from Yemeni, if I’m not mistaken), German and Slavic. Maybe Sanskrit/Indic languages, too?
In ancient Greek it vanished early on, except when folded into a diphthong, as in πλε(F)ω, επλευσα.
English and standard Arabic, by contrast, have defiantly retained it (except maybe somewhere in rural England), and Danish has redeveloped it in some contexts.
In Polish and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and maybe some other Slavic languages, the w sound has developed out of the “dark,” unpalatalized l, spelled ł in Polish and o, as in masc sing past tense -ao, in BCS.
Yes, it is somewhat fascinating. Wonder if someone’s done a full on study on the w/v sound and their development in various languages?
Perhaps not; nevertheless my reason for bringing it up is the curiosity it elicits (at least for me) on the evolution of pronunciation of the two letters in Hebrew and Greek, and also of V in Latin.
If we take the name Silvanus for instance; in Greek this was originally transliterated from Latin as Σιλουανος, with ου corresponding to the original /w/ sound in Latin v. Numerous Hebrew-Greek transliterations of names which have ו use ου as opposed to just υ (Ιουδαιος, Ιησους, Ιουδας, Ελιουδ, Ζαβουλων, Σαρουια, Γαζουβα, Ζερουχ, Σαλουμ etc.). So why wasn’t the Hebrew דָּוִד originally transliterated (well, “more commonly”)* as Δαουιδ? As transliteration is attempting to convert both letters and vowel-sounds into the target language, evidently there was something in the pronunciation of דָּוִד where ου didn’t correspond to the relevant sound of the vav within the name. As with Silvanus and David, both would later have ου or υ changed to β.
Then we have the interesting transliteration of מֹשֶׁ֔ה (Moses) as Μωυσης, which later dropped the υ and became Μωσης, and שָׁאוּל (Saul) as Σαουλ, which became Graecised as Σαυλος, which again drops one vowel. But now I’m just rambling on, so shall stop.
( *I have found at least two places where it is transliterated as Δαουιδ: in a David-Goliath inscription at a possible Christian building in Dura-Europos, and in PHamb bil. 1, which is a mixed Greek-Coptic Codex containing portions of the Acts of Paul, Song of Songs, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes.)
But why assume that transliteration comes into it at all? Wouldn’t the spelling simply be that of Greek-speaking communities familiar enough with Greek writing but quite ignorant of Hebrew script?
Here’s a rough outline of a scenario I invite you to knock down: The writers may well have spoken Aramaic as well as Greek (and clearly they were literate in Greek), but they did not speak Hebrew and would not have been able to read it.
Does that satisfy the evidence, or am I extrapolating too much from the apparent situation with the gospels?
Sorry this goes so much wider than your concern with υ/ου. It was your assumption of transliteration from Hebrew that got me wondering. Are you perhaps underestimating the oral?
If we bring into account the Greek Septuagint, of which at least we think the Torah had been done circa 3rd century BCE, and the rest of the books followed in the subsequent two centuries, there were at least more than a few people who could read Hebrew (and likely speak it) in order to translate it all into Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls do also show there were Hebrew speakers/writers still around as well by the second century CE.
Furthermore more than likely Hebrew was still spoken by many even in the 1st century CE; search for the following by Randall Buth and Chad Pierce: Hebraisti in Ancient Texts: Does Ἑβραϊστί Ever Mean “Aramaic”?; and the following by Ken Penner: Ancient Names for Hebrew and Aramaic: A Case for Lexical Revision. As a result of these two articles’ conclusions, the New Testament also attests that much of the population (at least in Jerusalem) were able to speak and understand Hebrew.
Here’s a rough outline of a scenario I invite you to knock down: The writers may well have spoken Aramaic as well as Greek (and clearly they were literate in Greek), but they did not speak Hebrew and would not have been able to read it.
Does that satisfy the evidence, or am I extrapolating too much from the apparent situation with the gospels?
I sort of answer this above. Quite a few of the names I put in the previous post were taken from the Septuagint, and don’t feature in the Gospels (only the first 3 examples feature in the New Testament); Δαυιδ was present in the Septuagint long before the Gospels were written, thus the same spelling has come from one to the other, where those who did the transliteration were Hebrew readers/speakers.
Sorry this goes so much wider than your concern with υ/ου. It was your assumption of transliteration from Hebrew that got me wondering. Are you perhaps underestimating the oral?
Depends on exactly what is envisioned by the word “transliteration”? For me this isn’t just letter-to-letter correspondence, but also very much includes how the word was pronounced, especially when it comes to Hebrew where there is technically in most names no actual vowel letter used, yet is still provided in the transliteration.
Δαυιδ is a good example of this, where the first α isn’t represented by any Hebrew letter, and in the defective spelling (which was the predominant to the plene) where the ι also isn’t represented by any Hebrew letter. Μυωσης as well, with υω not being a transliteration of any letter in the name. Evidently the pronunciation of the names has to have accounted for the vowel-choices used to represent the vowel-sounds where there’s no underlying letter. The vowel points on Hebrew are a later invention to assist with a pronunciation which was not widely spoken; but this doesn’t matter for pre-3rd century CE, where there were still many Hebrew speakers around (not to mention translators; Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion were all Hebrew-Greek translators of the 2nd century CE; Hebrew and Hebrew pronunciation will have to have been alive and well for this to be done).
For Hebrew-Greek transliteration (and Aramaic-Greek transliteration), the oral/pronunciation of the word and/or name plays a significant part in how it’s transliterated, whether that be Greek, Latin, or English. How much Aramaic played a part on the pronunciation of Hebrew would be another discussion entirely. 
Thanks. I don’t have much disagreement with that. I wasn’t actually suggesting that the Septuagint was like the gospels, and I do still wonder just how extensive the interface between Hebrew and Greek was. Of course we know there were a number of translations from the Hebrew Torah etc. into Greek, undertaken by individual scholars. The Hexapla bears witness to that. But that was exceptional, and it’s understandable that none of them enjoyed wide circulation. I find it striking how very different from one another the translations were—but that too would be another discussion (though a very interesting one).
I rather think we’re now in the wrong forum here.
I’ve been wondering whether the word κυνέω, to kiss, is evidence that people in some time and place pronounced upsilon with puckered lips.
In modern Greek upsilon is usually prounced the same as iota, but is pronounced as v or f in certain situations, e.g., in εὐθυμία.
I’m sure that the answer to how to pronounce Δαυιδ depends completely on very specific details of time and place.
And perhaps κυνέω originally referred to the practice of kissing dogs.
As to Δαυιδ, undoubtedly pronunciation varied according to time and place, but would hardly have depended completely on those factors!
I think that makes a better folk etymology if you assume that it refers to dogs kissing humans, which happens a lot more often.
At least Homer is dog-positive. The tanakh and the Christian bible are relentlessly anti-dog.