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TIE ERASMIANPRONUNCIATIONOF
ANCIENTGREEK: A NEW PERSPECTIVE
Our pronunciation of Ancient Greek, as Wilamowitz observed,
is essentially a practical question.' Not that historical linguistics has
settled all the phonetic issues: the data of W. S. Allen's Vox Graeca,
widely accepted as the bible of "restored" pronunciation, are not
beyond dispute, and certain questions, especially regarding accents,
will always be answered hypothetically. Actual pronunciation, however,
is not a matter of theory, but of praxis: real sound, not a description
of sound. Often confusing the two, most classicists, I suspect, would
claim that we know fairly accurately what sounds the Greek alphabet
represented, yet no two of us would sound alike in reading a given
passage of prose or poetry. Our students, if they are interested, have
no consistent models to follow. As a result, the pronunciation of
Ancient Greek today generally bears no relation to any language,
living or dead; it is an embarrassment. The less said aloud, the better.
After all, the printed text provides enough challenges as it is: grammar,
substance, theme (all much easier to write about); who has class
time to spend on pronunciation? Where's the benefit?
One benefit lies in appreciating Greek as a language in its truest
sense, involving the tongue (and many other parts of the body), as
opposed to the extended meaning of "communication system," as
with sign language or computer languages. This level of appreciation
is not merely ornamental, nor is it extraneous to the question of
meaning. It is impossible to read a passage aloud properly unless
the reader knows what it means. Obviously, this involves much more
than the correct sounds of the letters and phonemes. It is language
from the inside out, a far cry from the cerebral processing of the
visual stimulus of letter shapes, or the typical jigsaw puzzle method
of translation: finding the verb, matching up words, rearranging it
all to make sense. It is also, of course, the method used by the
ancients themselves. We might try to respect that, or at least realize
that we are missing much of the author's intent when we read silently.
Reading silently is not so much the problem; it is unavoidable.
Rather, it is reading aloud badly. But who can teach us to do it
well? By themselves, books cannot. We need living models, or at
least audio facsimiles. Some do exist: W. B. Stanford's tentative recording
is now passe,2 but Stephen Daitz has "The Pronunciation and Reading
of Ancient Greek: A Practical Guide," augmented by entire recordings
of the Iliad and Odyssey and numerous other examples.3 Daitz's "restored
pronunciation" embodies the results of Allen's Vox Graeca, and sets
In his Hisiorv of Classical Scholarship, A. Harris, tr. (London repr. 1982) 42.
2 A small vinyl recording once accompanied his Sound of Greek (Berkeley 1967).
3 As part of the Living Voice of Greek and Lalin Series, available from the
Audio-Forum division of Jeffrey Norton Publishers, Connecticut.
323
324 MATTHEW DILLON
a standard for that method that will not soon be surpassed. Yet few
have chosen to follow that standard, and not only because of general
indifference. In particular, Daitz's use of a pitch accent is difficult
to imitate convincingly (even Allen cautions against the "melodic
method," albeit reluctantly and despite his own evidence),4 and the
effect as a whole, impressive as it is, sounds necessarily experimental,
quite unlike any language we have heard before. It is useful for the
few, but the rest will probably look elsewhere, or just give up the
game.
The only other readily available model is obvious, but usually
rejected out of hand: Standard Modern Greek. Horrified by iotacism
and other later developments, classicists have chosen to follow a
reconstructed phonology-not unreasonably, it would seem, yet so
totally divorced from living practice that it has now degenerated to
the present barbarous (i.e., un-Greek) state. For their part, Greeks
today shake their heads sadly at us "Erasmians," so called after the
prince of Renaissance humanists, who is widely regarded (not quite
fairly, I will argue) as the instigator of the last Great Schism separating
East from West: the Erasmian Pronunciation, the forerunner of Daitz's
Restored Pronunciation.
This paper presents a fresh look at Erasmus' fundamental work
on the subject, De Recta La/ini Graecique Sermonis Pronunuiatione,5
not so much to reexamine the fine linguistic points, but rather to
appreciate the underlying principles of his attempt to reform
pronunciation. Through judicious use of these principles, a new proposal
for modified standards of pronunciation will be offered that may
prove more amenable to Philhellenes, both Greek and barbarian.
It is well known that Erasmus was not the first to call for a
more "correct" pronunciation of Ancient Greek.6 Spaniards, Italians,
and possibly even Greeks were all proposing a return to a reconstructed
classical pronunciation. Erasmus generally receives the credit, however,
not only because of the relative readability of his treatise, but also
because, as the recognized leader of Renaissance Humanism, his
reputation and prestige ensured that this new trend in scholarship
would have the widest possible audience. And in fact, the essay was
an immediate success, as it went through several editions and soon
'T The Phonemic S;'stem of the 4ttic Dialect 400-340 BC (Goteborg 1974); The
Phonology of Ptolemaic Koine (G6teborg 1977); and 7he Phonology of 4ttic in the Hellenistic
Period (Goteborg 1978).
S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds. (Oxford 1996) s. v. "Pronunciation,Greek."
12 Thus, for a crucial point of iotacism, Teodorsson (above, n.l0 [1978]) 64, declares
that the "strong evidence of the documents from the Academy of Plato . . . may be
decisive." These inscriptions, including what may be schoolboy tablets with spellings like
AOtva, are commonly dated to the fourth century B.C.E., but in private correspondence,
Prof. William Morison claims that they may be as late as the second century C.E.!
13 (Above, n.9) esp. 102-7.
'4 Some would go even further. C. Caragounis, "The Error of Erasmus and Un-
Greek Pronunciations of Greek," Filologia N/eotestamentaria 8 (1995) 151-85, presents
an even more radical analysis of the epigraphic data, and claims that in all respects,
Greek phonology had already developed into that of Standard Modem Greek by the fifth
century B.C.E. His use of inscriptions is not as careful as Teodorsson's, however, and his
polemical tone detracts from the substance of his argument. I therefore have chosen to
follow rather the lead of Teodorsson and Horrocks.
Is Teodorsson (above, n.l0 [1978]) 9.
1h Teodorsson (above, n.l0 [1974]) 27, 172-73; (above, n.l0 [1978]) 8.
THE ERASMIAN PRONUNCIATION OF ANCIENT GREEK 327
as it goes, but it gives only one side of the story. It makes a difference
whether a man is speaking on the stage or bema, or in the agora; it
may even make a difference, according to Socrates in Plato's Cratylus
(418c), whether the speaker is a man or a woman. Horrocks is convinced
by this thesis, and is careful to note the register of the supposed
speaker as he transliterates his examples. If this seems a reasonable
approach,then there is a sound linguistic/historicalprecedent for adjusting
pronunciation to fit the text: for poetry, we might, for example, adopt
a more conservative or formal pronunciation, with careful attention
to quantity, but a more progressive one for prose.
If orthography can do only so much to preserve the unique sound
quality of a language, there remains the testimony of the experts:
the Greek and Latin grammarians, with whom Erasmus was intimately
familiar in a way that can only be matched by the most highly specialized
philologists today. Of course their evidence is invaluable, but it is
also problematic, even if we allow for a conservative bent that might
be out of touch with everyday speech. So, for example, it is not
helpful when the Romans adopt a technical Greek vocabulary to describe
their stress accent, for which it was completely inappropriate. W.
S. Allen notes that, for example, the grammarians' use of the term
"circumflex" (to describe the accent of a Latin word with a long
penult but a short ultima) was an "embarrassment,"23but Erasmus
perpetuates this confusion in an elaborate description of just that to
distinguish the quality of the first syllable of, e.g., vidit from that
of vidi-to ignore which, says Bear, is a "sacrilege" (piaculum)!24
Of course, when confined to Greek, the ancient grammarians are on
firmer ground; yet even so, there is much that they fail to explain
(e.g., the nature of the grave accent) and ultimately much that they
simply cannot communicate without actually speaking. It's not all
their fault. Even with modern methods and symbols, one might well
despair of trying to learn, say, French phonology from a book. However
one places the tongue and lips and approximates the international
phonetic notation, the attempt is doomed without an audio model to
imitate.
Where Erasmus truly errs in his use of the ancient grammarians,
I would argue, is in his very trust in them as the authentic guarantors
of orthoepeia, practically to the exclusion of popular usage. This is
perhaps a philosophical rather than a political bias. At one point,
Bear expresses a Senecan objection to majority vote: "But there is
no such happy dispensation known to human history or to human
experience, nor is it ever likely to happen in the future, that what
is best will appear best to a majority of people."25 Specifically with
respect to linguistic usage, his numerous condemnations of the masses
have a distinctly antidemocratic, or rather, anti-demotic ring. There
23 (Above, n.4) 84.
24 Pope, 428-29; ASD, 67.
25 Pope, 372; ASD, 18-19. Pope (587, n.36) suggests Seneca's De vita beata 2.1 as
33 Pope, 348, notes that Erasmus "does not limit himself, as his predecessors had
done, to establishing the correct values of the vowels and diphthongs and consonants, but
also considers the largerunits of discourse,the word, the sentence, and what in our terminology
we should call the paragraph.In short his subject is, as the title implies, not just how to
make the sounds of the ancient languages, but how to speak them."
3 Pope, 428; ASD, 66; also see Pope, 436; ASD, 72.
3 Pope, 471; ASD, 99.
332 MATTHEW DILLON
41
Pope, 473; ASD, 100.
J would like to express my gratitude to the Basil P. Caloyeras Center for
42
Modern Greek Studies at Loyola Marymount University for affording me the opportunity
to study Modern Greek at the University of Athens in the summer of 1997, and to
my research assistant, Ms. Lubna Haddad.