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Ancient Greek phonology is the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of Ancient Greek. This article mostly deals with the pronunciation of the standard Attic dialect of the fifth century BC, used by Plato and other Classical Greek writers, and touches on other dialects spoken at the same time or earlier.
Ancient Greek in Italy is always [citation needed] taught in the Erasmian pronunciation. However, Italian speakers find it hard to reproduce the pitch-based Ancient Greek accent accurately so the circumflex and acute accents are not distinguished. Poetry is read using metric conventions that stress the long syllables.
The grammarian Dionysius Thrax used the Ancient Greek word ὑγρός (hygrós, transl. moist) to describe the sonorant consonants (/l, r, m, n/) of classical Greek. [1] [2] It is assumed that the term referred to their changing or inconsistent (or "fluid") effect on meter in classical Greek verse when they occur as the second member of a consonant cluster (see below).
Ancient Greek had a broader range of vowels (see Ancient Greek phonology) than Modern Greek has. Eta (η) was a long open-mid front unrounded vowel /ɛː/, and upsilon (υ) was a close front rounded vowel /y/. Over the course of time, both vowels came to be pronounced like the close front unrounded vowel iota (ι) [i].
The loss of vowel length and the spread of Greek under Alexander the Great led to a reorganization of the vowels in the phonology of Koine Greek. Vowel length distinctions appear to have been lost first in Egypt and then in Anatolia by the 2nd century BC, with Greek inscriptions beginning to display short/long vowel confusions from the 1st ...
Download as PDF; Printable version; ... move to sidebar hide. Greek pronunciation may refer to: Ancient Greek phonology ; Koine Greek phonology ... Modern Greek phonology
The accents (Ancient Greek: τόνοι, romanized: tónoi, singular: τόνος, tónos) are placed on an accented vowel or on the last of the two vowels of a diphthong (ά, but αί) and indicated pitch patterns in Ancient Greek. The precise nature of the patterns is not certain, but the general nature of each is known.
Greek underwent monophthongization at many points during its history. For instance, the diphthongs /ei ou/ monophthongized to /eː oː/ around the 5th century BC, and the diphthong /ai/ monophthongized to /eː/ in the Koine Greek period. For more information, see Ancient Greek phonology § Monophthongization and Koine Greek phonology.