Reading the English “Chaos” pronunciation poem makes me really sad. If English is that hard for modern speakers to pronounce, how am I ever possibly going to understand all the clever rhymes, plays on words, and pronunciation tricks of a dead language?
You can notice them by reading in context much of the time. For example, in the Odyssey, the poet often uses the verb ὀδύσσομαι when referring to Odysseus (Ὀδυσσεύς). Remember that these poems were orally performed and sound was an essential component.
I listened to that poem on Youtube, and there were literally dozens and dozens of words that were pronounced differently than I thought, often so differently that I suspect no native speaker of English would understand what I’m saying if I tried to pronounce them. (I’m not a native speaker myself).
But ancient Greek is different, especially early on. The spelling is very regular, there are simply no exceptions. Ancient Greek was written exactly as it was pronounced – they actually invented alphabetic writing and the phonemic principle, the idea that to each sound corresponds one and only one letter. They took the idea of writing everything as pronounced so literally that they wrote without any punctuation or even spaces between words – those are added by convention into modern editions. Because in real speech, you don’t pause between words, you run them together.
Come to think about, English might well have the most illogical spelling system in the world, at least if we only consider those that use alphabetic writing. Because:
Condition 1) applies, to some degree, to many languages – some, like French, being as unpredictable as English in this respect. But even with French you can almost always pronounce a word when know how it’s written, even if the opposite is not true; so condition 2) mostly applies to English, as far as I know at least.
Oh, okay! So are there any good links for ancient Greek pronunciation?
Yeah, English is… Illogical.
English names are a nightmare. Only locals and the upper classes seem to know how to pronounce Cholmondeley (chumlee) for example. Leicester square seems to fox many as far as I hear on the tube (that is,the underground, not the web site).
If you know Latin, French, German, and Greek, and are always sure to account for the great vowel shift of 1350 to 1600, English spelling is rarely problematic.
Sadly, I’m a common American. I know the difference between their, they’re, and there, though!