Hello, Χαίρετε, and welcome to Epic Greek History Episode 8, It’s Greek to Me: How to Pronounce Greek like an Ancient Athenian (Or a Modern American). I’m Scott Emmons.

I’ve been podcasting for just about a month and a half now, and I’ve settled into a rhythm that feels sustainable, so I’m going to make it my plan for releasing new content. At the beginning of each month, I’ll release a full-length historical episode, and those will proceed as much as possible in chronological order. Then, in the middle of the month, I’ll release a shorter episode that either digs a little deeper into something I’ve touched on in one of the main episodes or just explores some interesting topic that doesn’t have a specific place on the timeline. For this mid-month episode, I thought I’d address something that anyone who’s interested in ancient Greece is going to come up against at some point — the pronunciation of Greek words. For history buffs, that mostly comes down to names of people and places, but it may also include some important words that don’t have exact equivalents in English — words like arete, which is often translated as “excellence,” but depending on the context, it has shades of meaning on a spectrum from “manliness” to “virtue.”

 So, the practical takeaway at the end of this episode will be a set of loose guidelines for wrestling those complicated Greek words into English. But what are those guidelines based on? There’s an underlying question here that to me is much more interesting. What did ancient Greek sound like? And how can we even know? On the face of it, you might assume it’s impossible. It was over 2000 years ago, there was no recording equipment… you’d think there was just no way of knowing. But even if it seems counterintuitive, we have quite a bit of information about the basic sounds of classical Greek. Of course, the fine points are lost to us. I’m sure if we could time travel back to the classical era and read a choral ode from Euripides aloud to an audience of Athenians, our accent would sound really weird to them — but it would still be understandable. 

 Now, I specified Athens in that scenario for one main reason. Ancient Greek had a variety of distinct dialects. The poet Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect, for example. Alcman was an early poet from Sparta, where they spoke the Doric dialect. Other authors wrote in Ionic Greek. Naturally, there were differences in pronunciation from one dialect to another. Also, we’re talking about a very long time span, from Homer until the Byzantine era. Languages change through the centuries, and Greek is no exception. So we have to pick a time and place, and the natural choice is Attic Greek, the dialect spoken in Athens at its peak in the 5th into the 4thcentury BCE. 

 So where are we going to look for evidence of ancient Greek pronunciation? An obvious place to start is with modern Greek. The language spoken in Greece today is still recognizably the language the ancients spoke, although it’s undergone significant changes. School kids in Greece are required to study a certain amount of ancient Greek, and it’s a challenge even for native speakers. To draw a very rough analogy, I’d guess it’s a little harder for them than it is for us English speakers to read Chaucer in the original. The standard practice in Greece is to use the modern pronunciation and not try to reconstruct the ancient sounds. Some classicists I’ve known have bristled at that, but I don’t think it’s much different from the way we use Standard Stage English when we perform Shakespeare, even though English pronunciation has changed a great deal since the Elizabethan era. In any case, modern Greek gives us at least a starting point for reconstructing the classical pronunciation system. Consonants have remained consonants, vowels have remained vowels, and some sounds have continued more or less unchanged. 

 But we can’t depend very heavily on the modern language, because Greek pronunciation has changed a great deal over the centuries. That’s immediately clear when you look at the vowel system. In modern Greek, the letter iota is pronounced “ee.” The letter eta is pronounced “ee.” The letter upsilon is pronounced “ee.” The combinations “epsilon-iota,” “omicron-iota,” and “upsilon-iota” are all pronounced — you guessed it — “ee.” Now, it’s very unlikely that when the ancient Greeks adapted a Phoenician alphabet, they decided, “Let’s just use a random assortment of vowels and digraphs to represent the same sound.” Clearly, what’s happened there is the same thing that’s happened in a lot of languages, including English. There have been vowel shifts. In this case, several different vowels and diphthongs have gradually shifted to that “ee” sound. 

 So a lot has changed, but let’s look at an example of a sound that has stuck around since ancient times. The letter tau is basically equivalent to our “t.” It makes the “t” sound in both ancient and modern Greek. How do we know? Well, for one thing, we fortunately have the Latin language to help with that. When the Romans started writing Greek words in their texts, they transliterated from the Greek to the Latin alphabet. And when they encountered a tau in Greek, they invariably used the letter “t” to represent that sound. At this point you might reasonably ask, how do we know what sound the Latin “t” made? Well, Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian — basically every language derived from Latin — has the same sound represented by that character. So that alone gives us a pretty good indication of what the ancient “tau” sounded like.

 But as compelling as that is, it’s still circumstantial evidence. It would help a lot more if we could have a witness from ancient Greece to tell us how they talked. Well, as it turns out, we have several witnesses. Ancient Greek culture placed a very high value on the spoken word — both for poetry and for oratory. So naturally, authors concerned themselves with the best, most effective ways to speak. And over time, as rhetoric became more refined and more of a discipline, grammarians wrote detailed descriptions of how the sounds of their language were produced. They actually described the positions of the lips and tongue for pronouncing particular sounds. A lot of our standard linguistic terms for the categories of phonemes — for example the “t” and “d” sounds being called “dentals” and “k” and “g” being “palatals” — those terms come straight from those ancient grammarians.

 So let’s look at a couple of examples. The Greek letter zeta is a great one to start with. A grammarian named Dionysius Thrax tells us clearly that it was a double consonant, a “z” sound followed by a “d” sound — “zd.” That sounds weird to an English speaker, and in fact a lot of American and British classicists reverse the pronunciation and make it “dz” as in “kudzu” when reading Greek aloud. But to the ancients, it was “zd” as in “Mazda.” To take another example, we know that the letter rho, corresponding to our “r,” was rolled — rrrrolled, like the modern Spanish and Italian “r.” Another Dionysius, this one of Halicarnassus, describes it for us. The rho is pronounced, he says, by the tongue, quote, “beating out the breath as it rises to the palate near the teeth.” Unquote. The philosopher Plato gives us some insight on this too, in a dialogue called Cratylus, where he talks about sounds and their relation to the meanings of words. He observes that the letter rho is great for words expressing motion, because of all the consonants, it’s the one where the tongue is most active and least static.

 I could go on but, if I went through the whole alphabet letter by letter, it would get very tedious very fast. If you really want to get into the weeds with this, I’d recommend you get yourself a copy of a book called Vox Graecaby W. Sidney Allen. It’s still in print, now in its third edition, I think, so it’s easy enough to get. But for now, those two examples should be enough to illustrate the point. Ancient grammarians tell us what the language sounded like! And lot of their observations are corroborated by Greek spelling conventions. When Dionysius Thrax tells us that the zeta sound is “zd,” we can see that in writing. Ancient Greek had a suffix “-de”, which meant “toward” or “to” a place. So if you’re talking about going “to Athens,” the appropriate form would be “Athenas” plus “de.” But instead of ending Athenas” with a sigma and adding “de” with a delta, they’d use the zeta in that position. “Athenasde.” 

 So we have grammarians, comparisons with Latin and modern languages, and patterns in Greek writing. There’s still one more type of evidence to consider, which is tricky but fun — namely, onomatopoeia. Either words that imitate the sound of what they represent, like “cuckoo” in English, or just straight-up sound effects. The example I want to use here is the vowel eta, which is admittedly one of the trickier ones. From Latin transliteration and comparison of different Greek inscriptions, we can be pretty sure it was an open vowel sound somewhere between “ah” and “eh.” When I was a grad student at Indiana University, we had a linguist in the department who said the eta sound was like the southern Indiana pronunciation of “cow.” And we have some support for that in a fragment of a work by an Athenian comic playwright that uses the combination beta-eta to represent the sound of a sheep bleating: “Baa! Baa!” Of course, there’s a range of ways you could represent a sheep sound in writing, but it's not a super wide range. In a modern Greek pronunciation, that same beta-eta combination comes out as “Vee! Vee!” which is about as far from a sheep sound as I can imagine. But onomatopoeia is tricky, and you’d never want to rely on it alone. Another fragment of Athenian comedy renders the sound of a dog barking as “Bau! Bau!” In modern Greek, the same letter combination gives you “Vaf! Vaf!” Which could be just as good, depending on the kind of dog you’re talking about. 

 While I’m on the subject of onomatopoeia, I can’t resist quoting one of my favorite lines from the Iliad. This is the scene where the god Apollo unleashes a plague by shooting an arrow into the Greek camp. In the Richmond Lattimore translation, the line runs, “Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver.” In Greek, δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ᾽ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο. Even ancient and medieval commentators noticed the clever use of sound effects in that line. 

 So those are the ways we can tell what ancient Greek sounded like. How do we put it into practice today? Of course, nobody’s going around speaking classical Greek, but we do need a pronunciation system if we’re going to quote ancient authors, the way I just quoted that line from Homer. In Greece, as I said earlier, the tradition is just to use the modern pronunciation, and it works fine. Here in the English-speaking world, we’ve ended up with a system that’s often called Erasmian pronunciation, because the Renaissance humanist Erasmus wrote an influential treatise where he tried to reconstruct ancient Greek sounds. We’ve actually moved quite a bit beyond Erasmus in our understanding of Greek pronunciation, but we haven’t gone all the way back to classical Greek either. The traditional system in the U.S. and Great Britain is kind of a McGyvered mix of ancient sounds and our own modifications, because the mechanics of English are just different. 

 For example, I oversimplified a bit when I talked about the “t” sound earlier. We English speakers have to work pretty hard to hear a difference between an aspirated and an unaspirated “t.” The aspirated version is like the “t” in “top,” where there’s a puff of air when you say it. The unaspirated version is like the “t” in “stop,” where there’s no puff of air. That’s hard for us to hear, because we don’t attach any difference in meaning to those two sounds. But the ancient Greeks heard it very clearly, so they had tau for the unaspirated sound and theta for the aspirated version. So the name “Theodore” starting with theta would be “T-heodoros,” not “Theodoros.” But since our ears just aren’t attuned that way, the usual convention is to pronounce the theta as a “t-h” in English, as in “think.” So our system is a step toward classical pronunciation, but it’s really its own thing. I should add that ancient Greek also had tonal accents, so the pitch would rise or fall according to the accent used. Most people today ignore that altogether and just use stress accents.

 So now we finally come to that practical question for people who maybe aren’t studying Greek but just want to talk about the history, the myths, and so on. How do you know how to pronounce a Greek word or name when you come across it? There are really no hard and fast rules, but there are at least some guidelines. When I first took Greek in college, the professor was an older guy who recommended an old-school approach. You latinize the spelling, then anglicize the pronunciation. You can see that principle at work when you look at names of famous Greeks that have become part of the English language. For example, the philosopher Plato. In ancient Greek, that was “Platon,” with the Greek nu (the equivalent of our “n”) at the end. “Platon.” Latin authors dropped that final “n” when they transliterated a name like that. So we take the latinized spelling and then anglicize the pronunciation of the “a” so that we get “Plato” rather than “Plah-to.” Unfortunately, you can’t expect any consistency. Another well-known Greek author is Xenophon, and the Romans spelled it without the final “n.” But everybody still calls him Xenophon in English. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Xenopho.”

 My old professor’s advice has gotten a little musty in recent years, because a lot of authors and translators now prefer to use spellings that are closer to the original Greek instead of latinizing them — for example, rendering a kappa as “k” instead of turning it into a “c.” But the principle of anglicizing the pronunciation holds up pretty well if you’re trying to figure out how to say a name that’s not as familiar as Plato. And it allows for some variation. The example I’ll use is one that’s slightly tricky for an English speaker. The region up north of Attica, the area around Thebes, was called in ancient Greek, Βοιωτία. In English, that’s usually spelled B-o-e-o-t-i-a. We normally pronounce the “oe” combination as “ee,” as in the name “Phoebe.” And when we see a “t-i” followed by an open vowel, we turn that into a “sh” sound. Put it all together and you get “Boeotia.” That’s the most common solution in English. But you could say, “Bee-O-tee-a” or even “Boi-O-tee-a,” and you wouldn’t really be wrong. It would just be a choice not to anglicize some of those letter combinations. On the other hand, I used to listen to a Greek history podcast where the host kept pronouncing it “Bo-EE-sha,” and it drove me nuts. That “o” before the “t” is never going to be silent. So I’d call that a pronunciation fail. The moral of the story… Just pay attention to the letters on the page or the screen, and most of the time, what you come up with will be an okay solution.

 That said, I’ll concede that it’s a little easier said than done, because you’ll occasionally run into letter combinations that can be confusing. In Greek, there’s also a lot less sensitivity to word length than in English. Here in the U.S., anyway, if you use a word with more than three syllables, people will look at you like you’re some kind of egghead. But Greek, both ancient and modern, allows for a lot more building of words from roots, so that a word can theoretically stretch out almost indefinitely. In fact, one of Aristophanes’ comedies contains the longest word in all of extant Greek literature. It’s a compound word representing an imaginary dish with a lot of ingredients. And that word is… 

λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων

 Go ahead, latinize the spelling and anglicize the pronunciation. I’ll wait. 

 And that’s it for this episode of Epic Greek History. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and if you did, a positive review would be much appreciated. If you have comments, corrections, or questions, shoot me an email at scott@epicgreekhistory.com. I’m Scott Emmons. The music for my theme song was composed and recorded by Parry Gripp. My logo and other artwork are by Chris Harding. Until next time, εὐτυχεῖτε! Be well.