okay just curious, my text books give the pronounciation of the omega like “au” as in caught. But it seems like
most people pronounce it like “ow” as in show. which way do you pronounce it.
To use the IPA, I pronounce it [ɔ:], basically just following Allen in his Vox Graeca. The sound doesn’t really exist in my English – it’s close to my “o” in “sorry” but longer, but from what I understand that is what the “au” in “caught” is among those people who say “caught” different from “cot” (I don’t).
(For completeness sake, when I’m using the Modern Greek pronunciation, though, I pronounce it just like omicron, which is like the “ow” in “show”, but without the glide at the end and it’s a bit more open.)
The Berkeley Language Center has it as the “aw” in English “saw”.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ancgreek/pronunchtml/omegaU.html
… i pronounce it as ‘ou’ like the o in omega since it’s basically a elongation of the omicron
(or as my textbook: Athenaze says: as the sound in ‘caught’ but held longer)
Ooh, that’s not quite right. I’m not sure why Athenaze would say that.
In Ancient Greek vowels have quality and quantity. The quality is what most of us think of when the phrase “different vowels” is uttered. The sounds /a/ and /i/ have different qualities — due to the acoustics of the mouth and tongue configurations, etc. In ancient Greek, but not in modern English or most modern Romance languages, vowels may also be distinguished by their duration. We have vowels in English that get called “long” or “short” but this is misleading historical dross.
The Greek vowels α, ι and υ may occur in long or short versions. We have no reason to believe the long and short varieties differed by quality (i.e., we have no reason to believe a short iota was pronounced like the i in pin).
When we get to the /e/ and /o/ series of vowels, though, things get more complex. These two vowels come in for strange treatment in plenty of languages. It is true that ω and η are long, but they do not have the same qualities as ο and ε. If you put two epsilons together you get the so-called “spurious” diphthong, ε+ε = ει; if two omicrons you get the other spurious diphthong, ο+ο = ου (which later came to be pronounced /u/, which we all use).
I wish phpBB would let me lay out tables. Anyway, for the reconstructed pronunciation…
- ε is pronounced tense, like day, but without the /i/ sound at the end in English
- ο is pronounced tense, like know, but withou the /u/ sound at the end in English
- η is prounced lax and long, like bet, held long, ehhh-ish
- ω is pronounced lax and log, like caught in those dialects of English that don’t pronounced that like ‘ah’
- ει is just ε pronounced long
Gigas, what textbook are you using?