Talk:Ancient Greek phonology/Thrax's responses to RFC comments

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This page has been created as an alternative to premature archiving of the whole Talk:Ancient Greek phonology page. It contains the long arguments that have followed, and will presumably continue to follow, on new input from outside editors responding to the Request for comment. User:Thrax' comments to the summary of previous discussions and to "Responses to RFC" have been moved here.

[edit] Summary of previous discussions

One editor, User:Thrax wants to include in this article the hypothesis that the pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very similar to that of Modern Greek, whereas all other editors have the opinion that this is a marginal view and should only be mentioned in one sentence. Andreas 03:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

The other editors are not professional linguists and are out of their depth. The reconstructed pronunciation is no longer valid in the field of modern linguists and its claims and dates of alleged sound changes and the nature of the alleged changes themselves can not be scientifically justified. There is overwhelming evidence from the inscriptional record and comparisons with the evolution of Semitic languages that proves that all of the elements necessary for modern Greek pronunciation were intrinsic to the Phoenician based script the ancient Greeks adopted from the time the script was devised since all of the symbols representing plosives were also allophones for fricatives in proto-Semitic by necessity. Comparisons with Latin along with biblical Hebrew show that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the dasea in ancient Greek were anything but fricatives, and the account of Dionysios Thrax makes no since at al unless the mediae were fricatives. Thefore the evidence reconstructed pronunciation is wither non-existent or inconclusive. With no conclusive evidence it is fraudulent to claim that so-and-so is how Attic Greek was pronounced. The reconstructed pronunciation is not a valid scientific theory but nothing more than an out of date convention and Wikipedia must label it and all of its claims as such and state the places of contention and the lack of evidence. --Thrax 15:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Responses to RFC

This area is for editors who have not participated in the discussion until now. Please put your responses here. Please, do not edit the individual responses, but put your comments at the end of the section. Limit your comments to a few sentences.

Try not to be confrontational. Be friendly and keep calm.

Mediate where possible - identify common ground, attempt to draw editors together rather than push them apart.

If necessary, educate users by referring to the appropriate Wikipedia policies.

Thank you. Andreas 03:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


Being an expert of the Ancient Greek language, I can assure the readers that the reconstructed pronunciation is indeed 100% valid, and it is found in all respectable handbooks, also in the most recent ones. Even if the pronunciation of the "dasea" as fricatives may have been anticipated in certain dialects and in certain registers in the Classical period already, nothing suggests that it was adopted universally until the Roman period. --Enkyklios 16:40, 22 December 2005 (CET)

WRONG ! Dionysios Thrax contradicts everthing you say. You might be an expert on the reconstructed pronunciation but you are not an expert on the Greek language. Dionysios Thrax definition of the mediae makes absolutely no sense unless the dasea were fricatives. There is absolutely no evidecne in the historical record to indicate that the dasea were anything but fricatives. Even Latin renders them as fricatives and Sanskrit renders Xi as a fricative to. The Greek translation of the Hebrew bible also indicates that the dasea and mediae were fricatives since 280 BC in both languages according Hebrew linguists therefore the reconstructed pronouncation must be is wrong. --Thrax 20:37, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Let us not start the discussion once again (or move it to somewhere else). Even if we cannot agree on the true Ancient Greek pronunciation, one thing cannot be contested even by you: that the modern scholars are supporting the "Erasmian" pronunciation virtually unanimously.
WRONG ! The majority of modern scholars do not support the Erasmian view or the reconstructed pronunciation. The reconstructed pronunciation is considered by the majority of linguists to be scientifically invalid and untennable. The only reason why its is still taught is as an English speaking convention and no supporting evidence for it is provided since there isn't any. All the modern evidence including inscriptions and Semitic linguistics shows the reconstructed pronunciation is wrong. --Thrax 16:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Caragounis, Thrax' authority, represents a minority view which is not even cited by the respected linguists. He may of course be right anyway, but the point is that a Wikipedia page should reflect the mainstream view or views, or it will be misleading for the non-experts who are looking for a brief but balanced overview of the current state of scholarship. Enkyklios 11:26, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
How can Caragounis be a minority view when it is support be all Semitic linguists who state that the dasea and mediae in both Hebrew and Greek were already fully established as fricatives in the time of Alexander the Great. This implies that even in classical times they must have been pronounced as fricatives as well which is what Caragounis is claming and that totally invalidates the reconstructed pronunciation in its entirety since once Semitic linguistics is accepted that the plosives in the Phoenicians alphabet were also allophones for fricatives so that all the fricative in proto-Semitic can be represented there can be no evidence to support a non fricative nature of the dasea and mediae before classical times.
It is totally misleading to readers to present the reconstructed pronunciation as a valid theory on the matter and as unchallenged. The fact is that the reconstructed pronunciation is a 19th century theory that was never proven by its advocates at the time it was created and has still not be proven no can it be since all the modern evidence goes against it. Furthermore the Erasmian and reconstructed pronunciations are based on a documented lie and on racism which Caragounis has shown was the primary motivation of the advocates of this theory in its creators own words. --Thrax 16:01, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Please do not WRONG! me once more. As far as I know, you have not been able to cite one single modern linguist specialised in Ancient Greek who has written an article or a book in which he or she argues that Classical Attic was pronounced just like Modern Greek (Caragounis is not a linguist). All handbooks written in English, German, and French agree on the reconstruction as it is now presented on the Ancient Greek phonology-page. So, it is the majority view. Period. Enkyklios 16:25, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
A book ? Science isn't conducted by authors of books regurgitating out of date unsubstantiated rubbish and popularist fallacies in order to make money. Its conducted by presenting scientific papers and I have cited such. Chrys C. Caragounis (1995): "The error of Erasmus and un-greek pronunciations of Greek". Filologia Neotestamentaria 8 (16), Th. Papadimitrakopoulos (1889): Βάσανος τῶν περὶ τῆς ἑλληνικῆς προφορᾶς Ἐρασμικῶν ἀποδείξεων. Athens, Professor Dionysios Karvelas: "Erasmian Pronunciation: One More Falsification of History". I also cite the Wikipedia article on Hebrew [1] which shows that biblical Hebrew consonants were pronounced like modern Greek ones thus implying that in 280 BC modern Greek pronunciation was well established as the norm. --Thrax 17:39, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Please, just one book or one article written by a modern linguist specialised in Ancient Greek. Caragounis is not a linguist or a philologist, and Papadimitrakopulos is not modern. But, please, let us take the technical discussion somewhere else; you are welcome to pick the arena. Enkyklios 08:13, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
You are talking nonsense again. The reconstructed pronunciation is not a modern theory nor has it been substantiated by modern linguists. Repeating the same old 19th century out of date fallacies in a modern book does not constitute evidence or substantiation. The only differnece between modern linguists repitition of these fallacies and the original is that the modern linguists have removed all of the racist slurs from the original work (well most of them anyway) and have included the disclaimer that none of the nonsense they are regurgitating is provable given the historical evidence, or rather the complete lack of it, and modern research which is unanimously against the theory. Thanos Papadimitrakopulos publication is a perfectly valid source since it postdates the standard form of the reconstructed pronunciation that is still taught today (a theory that is never substantiated to students but is taught as unproven dogma) and he has never been refuted. Chrys C. Caragounis is a linguistics expert and a philologist and is thus a valid source. Development of Greek and the New Testament, Mohr Siebeck (ISBN 3161482905) is his most recent publication a probable the most recent research on ancient Greek pronunciation in existence. Anyone claiming to be an expert in ancient Greek that still believes in the reconstructed pronunciation has no right to be called an expert since it is like believing in the Ptolemaic Earth centred universe which observations have shown to be wrong. All of the experts in Semitic linguistics are against the reconstructed pronunciation of ancient Greek since they make it perfectly clear that ancient Greek was pronounced like modern Greek at the time the Septuagint was translated from the original Hebrew in 280 BC. This therefore implies that classical Greek must have been pronounced like modern Greek as well otherwise 72 Hebrew expert who were taught ancient Greek as children 50 years earlier would not have associated the proto-Semitic fricative gimel in Gomorra which was no longer used in the written language but was only spoken as a breath with the Greek letter gamma. Gamma therefore must have been fricative and there a myriads of other examples that Semitic linguists use to show that ancient Greek was pronounced like modern Greek and that the Hebrew alphabet represented the mediae and dasea and z as fricatives. It is clear from the study of Semitic linguistics and from experts in the filed like Caragounis and Papadimitrakopulos that the reconstructed pronunciation is a racist sham based on Germanic supremacy (as can be seen from the slurs in the papers of is original creators) and an affront to science and the only reason why it is still being tangut is for ethnocentric reasons alone. --Thrax 14:26, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Normally it's not worth the effort to refute Thrax's contributions: both their style and their content is normally sufficient to discredit them in the eyes of impartial readers without further comment. But given that he has now started adopting a different line of argument it's probably worth mentioning a couple of points:

  • the semitic letter gimel was pronounced [g], notably in the Phoenician alphabet which gave rise to the Greek; it developed a fricative allophone in Ancient Hebrew, but only between vowels, and it is still pronounced [g] in modern Israeli Hebrew
You are wrong. The Phoenician letter Gimel was already an allophone for both fricative and non-fricative g in proto-Semitic since both fricative and no fricative g exited in proto-Semitic. Later on the Hebrew and Aramaic non-fricative g became fricative and the fricative g became a breath whereas in Arabic the original proto-Semitic fricative g continued to exist as a fricative. Therefore when the proto-Semitic script that Phoenician is based on was devised in 1800 BC Gimel already represent both fricative and non-fricative g. --81.178.239.11 22:17, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
  • the word Gomorra does not begin with gimel in Hebrew
You are wrong again. I have already explained that Gomorra was nolonger written with Gimel in Hebrew in Hellenistic time but in the spoken language it was still pronounced using the proto-Semitic fricative g which was the same sound as modern Greek gamma. Since proto-Semitic fricative g was no longer written in Hebrew the only way the 72 Hebrew scolders could have recognised it and written it as gamma when they translated the bible into Greek in 280 BC is if Greek gamma was already fully established as a fricative when they learned to speak Greek 50 years earlier as children. --81.178.239.11 22:18, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
  • given that it is accepted that various changes in Ancient Greek pronunciation started within or soon after the classical period, usage in the Septuagint cannot be automatically be taken as evidence for Attic in the 5th Century, which is the main focus of the article. --rossb 16:25, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Wrong three times in a row. You have got a hattrick. It is not accepted that changes in ancient Greek pronunciation started after the classical period. It is not even accepted that changes even took place at all and Hebrew and Semitic linguists make it perfectly clear that they accept that the Greek of the Septuagint was pronounced exactly like modern Greek therefore if any changes took place they must have done so well before the Classical period. Let me also add that if you accept Semitic linguists and use the Hebrew pronunciation of the Phoenician letters that later became vowels in Greek then this results in the Greek diphthongs which from the description of Dionysios Thrax is a term which means two letters pronounced as one (and therefore not the same term used in Germanic linguistics), were pronounced as one letter with the same values they have in modern Greek. The reconstructed pronunciation is totally discredited by Semitic linguistic theory alone without even needing to mention Caragounis, and the reason is perfectly clear once you have read the work of its original creators. Its a totally unscientific theory based on racist fallacies about Germanic linguistic supremacy. Anyone reading the account of ancient Greek grammarians will recall that they all called the Germans barbarians because they could not pronounce ancient Greek correctly so how could any rational person invent a reconstructed pronunciation for ancient Greek that sounds completely Germanic. Only a racist could invent such a theory and that is why this theories creators are shown to be racists by their own words. --81.178.239.11 22:17, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Since Thrax has not been able to cite one article or one book written by a modern linguist specialised in the Ancient Greek language who accepts your hypothesis, I must conclude that it is impossible to do so. Caragounis is not "a linguistics expert and a philologist", but a professor of Biblical exegesis. He may be a competent theologician (even if he is accused of being a right-wing anti-gay one), but to judge from the article published in Filología Neotestamentaria, he is completely ignorant of the basic principles of historical linguistics.
I fail to see how it can be racist to deny that the Greek people has used an unaltered language system since the dawn of time. On the contrary, racism is the assumption of a special, unchangeable intellectual capacity of a certain group of people. So, the vehement denial that Ancient Greek may have sounded different than Moden Greek resembles racism more than the honest belief that any stage of a language is an independent system, which must be evaluated on its own terms.
Read the discussion here [2]. The creators of the reconstructed pronunciation are revealed as Greek hating racist by their own words. The reconstructed pronunciation noting more than a racist theory of Germanic supremacy. --Thrax 18:38, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Thrax' only argument, that the Greek β, δ, γ must be affricates because the Semitic equivalents were affricates, is invalid for two reasons: 1) As pointed out by rossb, the Phoenican sounds were not affricates; and 2) if one accepted Thrax' line of argument and believed that a letter derived from a foreign letter designating an affricate, must be an affricate itself, it would follow that the Latin b, d, g, which are derived from β, δ, γ, would be affricates as well and so would English b, d, g. It would of course be complete nonsense. Enkyklios 08:42, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
If you bothered to read the discussion that was censored you will see that the evidence to show that mediae were fricatives is overwhelming. I cited the account of Dionysios Thrax which proves the mediae were fricatives but the advocates of the reconstructed pronunciation knowing that it demolished their theory erased it. [3] [4] I cited the inscriptional record which is the basis of Caragounis research and the dishonest advocates of the reconstructed pronunciation erased that too. And once again you have shown that you have no grasp whatsoever of Semitic linguistics since I have told you often enough that proto-Semitic had both fricative and non-fricative forms of b, d and g (β, δ, γ) as well as f, t, k (φ, θ, χ) which were represented in Phoenician script by letters which were allophones for both. The fricative and non-fricative versions of these sound still existe today in Arabic but in Hebrew the original proto-Semitic fricative became breaths and the non-fricative became fricatives long before Hellenistic times. --Thrax 18:38, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
As for these sounds in other indo-European languages. Grimm got it wrong as I have prove in the discussion here. [5]. These sounds were originally fricatives since that is the only way German could have undergone the changes it underwent without the sounds of the psila, mediae and dasea being confused. --Thrax 18:38, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
We cannot know for sure how the Indo-European consonants that are traditionally reconstructed *bh, *dh, *gh originally sounded. Some scholars assume that they were simply voiced stops (the aspiration being secondary or facultative), but the large majority of Indo-Europeanists believes that they were in fact voiced aspirated stops. In most daughter-languages, they turn up as voiced stops: in Iranian, Armenian, Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic. In Indic they are voiced aspirated stops. In Germanic, they were originally voiced fricatives (cf. Verner's Law). Only in Latin and Osco-Umbrian, thay are voiceless fricatives. It is, of course, conceivable that Italic and Modern Greek represent the original stage. However, it is less economical and therefore also less probable that original voiceless fricatives would become voiced stops in the majority of the dialects, whereas it is comprehensible that the category of voiced aspirated stops would be unstable.
(In Sanskrit the palatal *ĝh and the velar *gh and labiovelar *gh before front vowels become h (this h was probably voiced); the most probably reconstruction for Proto-Indic is *jh [džh], since the labial, dental and velar correspondents are aspirates, and the closely related Iranian branch has z (*ĝh) or j (*g(w)hi, g(w)he). In other words, you cannot use Indic h as evidence for Proto-Indo-European *[χ].)
Grimm's Law falls apart because he has ascribed the proto-Indo-European mediae as plosives b, d, g. If they were plosives then proto-Germanic words beginning with PIE *p would have become muddled up with proto-Germanic words starting off with PIE *b unless the change from *p to f took place before the change from *b to p. Evidence exists for a staggered change occurring but if this was so then we have an even bigger problem in that the proto-Germanic voiced aspirates like *b^h would have become mixed up with the mediae such as *b when they became voiced plosives. If it is assumed that mediae were fricatives like modern Greek beta, delta and gamma then there is no problem of the voiced aspirates getting mixed up with the mediae since beta, delta and gamma can evolve directly into p, t and k. Further more it is much simpler for the change from *p, *t, *k to f, th, h to have taken place imediatly if *p, *t, *k were originally aspirated in PIE, ie. *p^h. *t^h and k^h. If PIE started off with *p^h. *t^h and *k^h as the initial values for the psila, *β, *δ, *γ as the initial valises for the mediae and *b^h, *d^h, and *g^h as the initial values for the dasea then all the sound changes in Germanic languages can occur without just one stagger which has already been accounted for, furthermore all the changes from PIE to proto-Greek and proto-Latin can occur without any kind of stagger if the dasea *b^h, *d^h, and *g^h turn directly into f, th, h (φ, θ, χ) in Greek, f, f, h in Latin and *b^h, *d^h, h in Sanscrit. All of the inscriptional records in Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as Semitic linguistics proves that the Phoenician alphabet used the letters p, t, k as allophones for the fricatives f, th, h (φ, θ, χ) since its inception therefore there is no evidence to substantiate the claim of the reconstructed pronunciation that φ, θ, χ were ever pronounced as p^h t^h and k^h. Furthermore all of the inscriptional records in Latin, Greek and Hebrew as well as Semitic linguistics proves that the Phoenician alphabet used the letters b, d, g as allophones for the fricatives β, δ, γ. When the fallacy of the reconstructed pronunciation is abounded Grimm's Law can be made to work. With this fallacy Grimm's Law falls apart. On top of this if the PIE psila and mediae are taken as p^h. t^h and k^h and β, δ, γ the inherent problem of the proto-indo-European theory of explaining why there are hardly any PIE roots beginning with either p or b is solved since most of the roots starting with p^h or β that may have originally existed probably evolved into wards beginning with w. --AntiCensorship 17:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
However, even though the Indo-European point of departure was most probably some kind of voiced stops, this does not, of course, prevent the Greek pronunciation from being, say, voiceless fricatives like in Italic (through the intermediate stage *[β], *[γ], *[δ]). The assumption that they were in fact stops relies on the Classical and Hellenistic internal and external evidence and not on comparisons with the other Indo-European languages:
1) π, τ, κ become φ, θ, χ before a word beginning with h-, and φ, θ, χ become π, τ, κ before φ, θ, χ in a following syllable (Grassmann's Law).
Grassmann's Law is not a scientific law but an observation. It is also an observasion seen with modern Greeek and can therefore be considerd as evidence that φ, θ, χ were fricatives. --AntiCensorship 17:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
2) φ, θ, χ are written ΠΗ, ΤΗ, ΚΗ in Cretan inscriptions and PH, TH, CH in Greek loanwords into Latin; because of the later tradition, it is usual for us to transcribe fricatives with stops + h, but without this tradition, stop + h would more probably designate aspirated stops.
3) The Romans interpreted the Greek φ as more similar to the Latin stop p than to the Latin fricative f; in all likelihood, they would have conceived a foreign [f] or [φ] as being identical to their own /f/.
In Latin PIE f, th and h were originally written as p, p and k which proves that p and k in the Greek script were allophones for f and h. The use of ΠΗ, ΤΗ, ΚΗ with H acting in the same way as it does in th is more proof that p, t and k in Greek script were originally allophones for both plosives and fricatives as the are in Hebrew. --AntiCensorship 17:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
4) In Hellenistic inscriptions and papyri, φ, θ, χ are ofte confused with π, τ, κ, which would be surprising if they were fricatives in all registers of Hellenistic Greek.
Caragounis argues that this is proof thay were fricatives using the same evidence since the confusion only occurs in early inscriptions where π, τ, κ, are allophonese. --AntiCensorship 17:36, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree that Blass' argumentation, as it is quoted in the footnote of Caragounis, is racist, and it would be denounced as unscientific if it occurred in a modern book. But it has nothing to do with the reconstructed pronunciation. Apparently Blass thought that Greek has changed under the influence of the many non-Greek speakers that assumed the Greek language. According to modern linguistics, Greek changed because all languages will change over time. The Classical pronunciation was not more noble or Hellenic than the modern pronunciation; it was just different. But can you see, Thrax, that you and Blass, commit the same mistake, believing that the true Greek must be the same in all eternity, and if it is not the same, it is not true Greek. Enkyklios 13:05, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

NO MATTER WHAT linguists you will cite, no matter what evidence you will find in the orthography to support either side, all of you ignore the only analysis which anyone can conclude from such a situation, which is that any reconstruction of greek from 5th century is completely impossible to prove, since an orthography is analyzed by a phonectic analysis which is NOT ruled by conventions we can deduce merely from the writing system. there is no audio evidence from the classical period of greek civilization and therefore, the actual greek pronunciation currently used is the closest thing to the pronunciation of greek antiquity we can study. i think you'd honestly have to be pretty firm in your bliefs about the validity of the reconstruction to look for evidence that was written. those who use it don't usually know the modern greek pronunciation if they did they would see that basically there are as many reasons to think somethign like that was in use in ancient times as there are reasons we can find for the reconstruction that is in use, furthermore, i'm sure if you study the greek language you'd understand that dialectic pronunciations were probably contempraneously used, and also that the greek use din inscriptions isn't always identical to the written dialect found int he greek classics which we have from copies that were "traditional". and also that i think youd have to be incredily anglocentric, which i think many erasmian scholars actually are to think that the way thats taught to translate the greek classics into "good english" isn't arguable. *laugh* if you think this. you are ethnocentric, outdated, and you accept traditional ideas and look for ways to support them, be warned that you're absolutists, and that there are many im sure who will not put up with this. IN SHORT the issue is not that so many of these or that scholars think this, its mor ena issue of what those of us who can see this without sentimentality think, and i assure you that while the opinions of those above on both sides are perhaps flawed, the current greek phonology IS the only natural phonology of the greek language we have available to study and also its the only phonology which is actually linked htorugh a natural process of evolution fromt hat of greek antiquity, i think you'd have to be completely "supportive" that i partisan about your ideas unless you understand that that is the reality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.177.134.30 (talk) 13:13, 6 April 2008 (UTC)