More Pronunciation Questions... New Testament

Greek Learning Greek
1

For fun, as a primer before digging into Pharr more seriously, I started reading Peter Jones’ “Learn Ancient Greek - A Lively Introduction to Reading the Language”.

To encourage learning the Greek alphabet and to pronouce it, he throws in transliterations and examples of greek words in Greek. An example from his book is as follows:

__

  • “A king sits on a θ?ονος, and devotees of Bacchus carry a θυ?σος with their delicious and highly alcoholic μεθη (which connected with αμεθυστος, α- meaning ‘not’: you put amethyst in your drink if you wish to remain sober. You can now do the Christian acronym ιχθυσ (‘fish’) - Ιησους Χ?ιστοσ Θεου υιος σςτη?, Jesus Christ, God’s son, savior’.”

This gets to my question. Did the authors of the New Testament, who wrote in Greek, pronounce Iota (ι) like the Romans pronounced consonal i as they did for Iulius as /j/?

Interestingly, the following words seem to suggest this: Ιωσηφ (Joseph), Ιε?ουσαλημ (Jerusalem), and Ιουδας (Judas).

Mark

2

In native Greek names that start with iota + vowel the iota is pronounced as a separate syllable, not a /j/: Ἰάσων.

I suspect non-Greek names would have been made to fit that pattern by native speakers of Greek, but have no definitive proof. It would interesting to look at the earliest Christan poetry in Greek — there’s at least one important name we could check the metrical behavior of.