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It's a pretty good rendition. Greek pronunciation has shifted a lot from ancient to modern. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism https://en.wikipedi
by hcayless 8y ago
It's a pretty good rendition. Greek pronunciation has shifted a lot from ancient to modern. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism. Among other things, the accentuation has gone from pitch, which comes out nicely in this version (though we don't know precisely what it sounded like), to stress. So while it may look quite familiar to you reading it, it would have sounded very different. There was a Modern Greek speaker in the intro to Ancient Greek class I took in college, and I remember him remarking how disorienting it was.
- adia 8y agoAccording to Wikipedia, "first century AD is the most probable guess" for the stele's age. By that time, pronunciation was probably nearer to the modern language than to Ancient Greek, although, of course, not exactly the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_pronunciation,_1st_century_BC_%E2%80%93_2nd_century_AD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_... Even Modern Greek, despite the homogenization effect of modern communications, still has local dialects which sound very different from one another and aren't easily intelligible to speakers of the standard dialect.
- hcayless 8y agoThe shift in pronunciation wasn’t a simple and straightforward process. If you’re trying to argue that the reconstruction is faulty on the basis that the shift was >50% complete, I’d respond that nothing like that level of precision is possible. Moreover, I’d expect funerary songs to be a bit conservative in their pronunciation.