[Lexicog] IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)

[Ronald Moe]

Mike Maxwell wrote:

"I'm assuming that we have little or no knowledge of 
classical or Koine Greek phonetics, i.e. what the allophones were. Or 
am I mistaken?"

 

No, you are correct. Which is why I put a Romanized transliteration in the
Pronunciation field. I could guess at the pronunciation on the basis of some
phonological rules and what (little) I know about proto-Indo-European and
the history of Greek phonetics. But there is no way anyone can know now how
Koine Greek was actually pronounced. I read somewhere that during the Koine
period the aspirated stops (ph, th, and kh) were in the middle of the
process whereby they became fricatives in Modern Greek. There is good
internal evidence that they were aspirated stops when the Greek orthography
was developed (Homer's time?). But I don't know if they were aspirated stops
or fricatives in Koine times.

 

There are other problems, such as the quality of the vowels. Greek had pairs
of long and short vowels for i/ii, e/ee, u/uu, and o/oo. (There was no
long/short distinction with the a.) But we don't know if the long/short
pairs differed in length only or also in quality (as in modern English).
Since the Greek orthography only distinguished e/ee and o/oo, we are not
absolutely sure when an i or u was long or short. (There is some evidence
from the metrical values in poetry and from the rules governing the
placement of stress.) Liddel and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon gives the
long/short values of i and u when they are known. So this is one place where
the Pronunciation field could be used profitably.

 

We also know that there were dialects. Some dialectal differences show up in
variant spellings of words when the difference was phonemic. But there must
have been other pronunciation differences. The moral of the story is that
there is a limit to what we can discover about dead languages or ancient
forms of living languages. The introduction to the dictionary should clearly
state what the Pronunciation field is being used for (phonemic
representation, phonetic values, indication of tone/stress, etc.).

 

Ron Moe

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