Erasmian vs modern pronunciation of Ancient Greek

Read a page of Xenophon aloud in a German Gymnasium, an Italian liceo classico or a British sixth form, and you will most likely use the Erasmian pronunciation: a school system that tries to approach the Attic Greek of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, adapted to the habits of each country. Read the same page in a Greek Lyceum and you will hear it with the sounds of Modern Greek, the way Greeks have read their ancient texts since Byzantine times.

The difference is large. βασιλεύς, “king”, is ba-si-LEUS in an Erasmian classroom and [vasiˈlefs] in Athens. ἥλιος, “sun”, is HĒ-li-os against [ˈiʎos]; αἷμα, “blood”, is HAI-ma against [ˈema]. In Modern Greek the letters and digraphs η, ι, υ, ει, οι and υι all sound [i], a merger called iotacism (ιωτακισμός).

Neither reading is simply “wrong”. The Erasmian pronunciation is a scholarly reconstruction made for study; the modern one is the living result of more than two thousand years of change. Writing for the Centre for the Greek Language, A.-F. Christidis suggests that Greeks can keep reading ancient texts their own way, as long as they know that the ancient Greeks did not pronounce them like that.

Most of the changes took place in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when Greek became the common language, the κοινή, of the eastern Mediterranean. Linguists date them mainly from spelling mistakes in papyri and inscriptions, so the dates are approximate and varied from place to place.

• Vowels. Classical η was a long open e; it closed and finally merged with [i]. From the middle of the 2nd century BC papyri confuse η with ει and ι, and αι with ε: the old diphthong αι had become a plain [e]. υ and οι first became a rounded [y], like French u, and only later [i]; for οι this happened around the 10th century AD.
• Consonants. Before the end of the Hellenistic period the aspirates φ, θ, χ ([pʰ tʰ kʰ]) became [f θ x], and the voiced stops β, δ, γ ([b d g]) became [v ð ɣ].
• αυ and ευ. From the first centuries AD they began to sound [av/af] and [ev/ef], as in Ευρώπη [evˈropi] and ευχαριστώ [efxariˈsto].
• Length and accent. Long and short vowels stopped being distinguished, and the musical pitch accent gave way to the stress accent of today.

A favourite piece of evidence for the older values comes from the comic poet Cratinus (fr. 45 Kassel–Austin), where someone walks along “saying βῆ βῆ like a sheep”. The joke only works if β was a [b] and η an e-like vowel, not [vi vi].

The Byzantine scholars who taught Greek in Italy brought their own pronunciation, close to Modern Greek. Some already knew that the letters had once sounded different: around 1300 Maximos Planoudes noted that ἐρήμην, ἐροίμην and αἱρεῖ μιν sounded identical. Western humanists such as Aldus Manutius, Girolamo Aleandro and Antonio de Nebrija compared the descriptions of the ancient grammarians and proposed corrections.

In 1528 Erasmus of Rotterdam published his dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione, “On the correct pronunciation of Latin and Greek”. It was a proposal for school reform; Erasmus treated his ideas as provisional and did not apply them consistently himself. The opposite view is linked with Johannes Reuchlin, who held that Ancient Greek should be read with the pronunciation of living Greeks, hence the old pair of names “Erasmian” and “Reuchlinian”.

The new system took hold first in England, at Cambridge, despite early opposition, and spread slowly: many schools kept the Byzantine reading until the 19th century, and Adamantios Korais defended it. Today the Erasmian pronunciation is the international norm, but strongly coloured by each local language, so θ may be [t] in one country and [θ] in another. In Greece, ancient texts are read with modern pronunciation.

For reading Homer or the tragedians in class, the Erasmian pronunciation has real advantages. It keeps apart sounds that the spelling still keeps apart: in modern pronunciation λύει, λύῃ and λύοι (indicative, subjunctive, optative) all sound [ˈlii], while an Erasmian reader hears three different forms. It also makes vowel length audible, and the hexameter is built on long and short syllables.

The modern pronunciation is not a degraded copy. According to E. Petrounias it comes very close to the pronunciation of the late Hellenistic period, and it is the one in which Greek has been spoken ever since. It also gives a student of Ancient Greek a large head start in Modern Greek: ἥλιος is still ήλιος, φωνή is still φωνή, and only the sounds need to be relearned.

Many teachers give a practical answer: use the Erasmian system if your course or exam requires it, and learn the modern values alongside it. Then every word you know from Xenophon or Plato is also a word you can hear and use in Greece. On this page the Greek words play in modern pronunciation; compare them with the way you read them at school.