Pronunciation

Archaic and classical Attic, according to what we know and can know, was mostly pronounced as written. The time since the 'invention' of the Greek alphabet in the mid-8th century had not yet allowed the language to drift away very much from the spelling, and Attic seems to have been a dialect not very rapid in phonetic development. A few rules however have to be observed:

• The old phoneme /u/, written <υ>, was tending towards [y] (as in French sûr, or German müde), e.g. Ὀλυττεύς ; in near Boeotia, and many other dialects, it remained unaltered until much later.
• The spurious diphthongs, written mostly <ε> and <ο>, were pronounced as long and closed [e:] and [o:], as explained in the chapter about the Alphabets on Attic vases. E.g. ἐποίει; Μȏσαι, Αἰσχύλο̄, Ηερμοῦ, Λε̄τοῦς.
• The real diphthongs <ει> and <ου> were probably tending to a monophthongised pronunciation already in the 6th century (e.g. Πειθο̄́, Πλούτο̄ν), which opened the possibility to spell the 'spurious' ones in the same way. The more open diphthongs <αι>, <οι>, <αυ>, <ευ> (e.g. Ηε̄́φαιστος, ἐποίει, Αὐτομέδο̄ν, Πολυδεύκε̄ς ) were more or less pronounced as written (mind: in real diphthongs, <υ> was not [y] but original [u]).
• Vowels in Ancient Greek could be long, even if they did not bear the accent, and short, even if they did. This could only exceptionally be seen from the spelling, and had to be learnt. So Διόνυσος had a long [y:] and a short first [o] also in the nominative, vocative, and accusative, not only in the genitive (Διονύσου; in Attic alphabet Διονύσο) and the dative. Diphthongs were always long.
• The aspirate voiceless stops written <φ θ χ> (e.g. Ηε̄́φαιστος, Πειθο̄́, Αἰσχύλος ) were pronounced just as in English push, ten, cow, but already towards the end of the period of Attic vases, these aspirates seem to have started their development towards the fricatives they are in Modern Greek ; they certainly started to change as early as that in the Laconian dialect, among others, which can be seen, for instance, in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. If we pronounce them in the modern way, we should do that for all three of them, and we should do the same with the voiced stops written <β δ γ>.
• The voiceless stops written <π τ κ> (e.g. Πε̄λεύς, Λε̄το̄́, Καλλιόπε̄ ) on the other hand did not have an aspiration. So we should pronounce them always in the French-Italian-Spanish way, or as in English stay, sky.
• For <ζ> (e.g. Ζεύς ) the pronunciation as in English zoo is slightly too modern; it seems as if it was normally pronounced [dz], sometimes [zd].
• The heta (e.g. Ηερμε̄́ς ) was pronounced [h] as in English hot.
• The other letters and their pronunciation correspond to their English equivalents.

Last update 2018-03-08