I have just begun learn biblical/Koine Greek. So, in the course of my studies ran across this [most excellent] website. And thought I'd spend time listening to the audio of Mark 1:1-8 repeatedly until I could easily follow the words. This worked great but I am puzzled as to the speaker's pronunciation of εὐαγγελίου (3rd word in Mark 1:1). It seems that the second syllable begins with the /v/ sound. Am I not hearing it correctly? I've even slowed the recording down by 50% and it still sounds like /v/ (i.e., e-van-ge-lee-yu).
I am likely missing something, here. Any help / correction would be very much appreciated.
Follow up question to this thread - gamma followed by an epsilon should be pronounced as a y... does this still happen for the final gamma in this word?
Thanks for a very helpful post Tim! And very nice about he history of pedagogy as well. Though I might add that I think the most recent research suggests that the joke thing has been overplayed in past scholarship and that it was indeed an earnest attempt on the part of Erasmus to restore historical pronunciation. It was mostly an academic thing at first though. Erasmus even continued to use Modern Greek pronunciation after righting De recta. It is interesting, then, that now that we know of a better historical pronunciation there are still many who want to maintain the old one. I actually have a whole chapter in my forthcoming book on Palestinian Koine pronunciation about the history of Greek pronunciation in teaching since the renaissance. I was thinking about condensing it into a 10 minute video or so for the website. Would people be interested?
This is also how it is pronounced in Modern Greek and where we in English get the word "evangelist". Originally in Greece - before 200-500 BC this would have been εὐαγγελίου ( eeyoo-an-ge-lee-yu), but as Ben says above it had changed by the time Mark was written to (e-van-ge-lee-yu).
Things only changed outside Greece in Western Europe in 1528 when Desiderius Erasmus published a book "De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione" , This outlined a new Greek pronunciation in the form of a dialogue between bear and a lion as to how to properly educate the lion's cubs. This Erasmian pronunciation system is more similar to that spoken in 5th Century BC Athens and not to that in 1st century Palestine. It has even been suggested that this whole dialogue was written by Erasmus as a joke. In any case this is the system that was adopted outside Greece for ancient Greece since then and the one taught in most other places.
If you want further details either you could try Randall Buth's publication (https://www.biblicallanguagecenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Greek_Pronunciation_2008.pdf) though this can be a little technical. I would also suggest Chapter 9 of Constantine Campbell's book "Advances in the Study of Greek" Zondervan 2015 (p182-184)(https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/advances-in-the-study-of-greek/id949574182?mt=11). There is a fair amount more if you search for "koine era pronunciation" in your search engine. Most text book use Erasmian pronunciation - though a couple of the newer books such as those by Rodney Decker or Frederick Long either mention or use Koine Era Pronunciation.
It is interesting to me the different pronunciation in English of the "ευ" from greek - looking at the words "eucharist" and "evangelist" the root of these words ευ is the same - but they are pronounced differently. Suspect this is because the word "evangelist" came to old English through Latin then Old French, but in contrast "eucharist" came to English after 1528.
Thanks for the message!
Yes, you are hearing it correctly. I use a restored "Living Koine" pronunciation on this website. This basically means that I use the vowels of the first century CE with the early Byzantine consonants (this is more practical for English speakers in terms of the consonants, especially with [f] instead of [ph], etc.)
One of the developments that occurred during the Koine period is that the second element of the diphthongs came to be realized as a consonant. This means that αυ and ευ went from being pronounced as [au] and [εu] to [av] and [εv]. A good illustration of this is the spelling of the name 'David'. There is much more detail to that development, so feel free to ask any follow-up questions if you are interested.