Re: an announcement...
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, September 24, 1999, 6:59 |
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Ed Heil wrote:
> It makes complete historical sense, but to an innocent fellow without
> much humanities background encountering Greek for the first time, it
> can be a bit daunting to hear one pronunciation -- an accepted vague
> approximation of the ancient one -- used in original language texts,
> and another used in English.
Oh, it can be far worse, I can assure you -- you might have to
speak it yourself! My Greek professor makes us not only
differentiate between a very un-English voiced, voiceless
and voiceless aspirated stops (/d/ for delta, /t/ for tau,
and /t_h/ for theta), we have to get the tonal accentuation right,
too! (We're graded on this, an Ancient language's pronunciation,
surreally).
Imagine some obscure Indo-Aryan variation of Hindi mixed in
with an equally obscure Chinese dialect, and a drop of German
consonant clustering for effect, and you can begin to visualize
the oddity of it all...
But it's an absolutely beautiful language!
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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
Denn wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
-- Mephistopheles, in Goethe's _Faust_
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