- Joined
- Aug 17, 2023
- Messages
- 1,915
- Reaction score
- 2,384
- Awards
- 11
You're right about that! I took an intensive course in Ancient Greek in grad school. One Oxbridge-educated prof was steeped in certainty suretain that the double-sigma was pronounced "ch" as in "churlish." His colleague (same educational chops) was ready to thrash any man who didn't agree double-sigma was "sh" as in the "sh**" the first prof was full of. In class? They both taught it as a slighthly emphatic "--ss--" like the books all said.Why are you certain of this? If it’s true then you’re pretty much screwed with any ancient language, as uncertainty, speculation, and debate abound for all of them.
The joy of satan website is meticulous enough to give variant pronunciations for the Hebrew alphabet in theit "Reverse Torah Rituals" (RTR). Likewise they offer pronunciations (including audio) of the Elder Futhark runes in Old Norse, modern Icelandic, modern German, and mebbe one or two others. I can't speak for the other languages, but their German is near enough Hochdeutsch to pass (although slightly theatrical.) (Come for the pronunciation; don't stay for the rituals. JOS wanna be Temple of Set when their other testicle drops.)
Post automatically merged:
If there is uncertainty, how can you assume Erasmus was wrong?one of the issues with the Barbarous Words is that the difference in pronunciation between many vowels is length, not sound. We don't have this in English really but the closest is, say,, the difference between the "o" in got vs gone. You extend it a little for "gone", without changing the sound. cf boot vs boon. That short vs long but SAME SOUND vowel is in a lot of languages but especially ancient greek. In most times and places, the two E vowels werent "eh" and "ay", they were "eh" and "ehh"
the problem here is that, when you're vibrating vowels at length, they're ALL "ehhhhh". So, I've kept each vowel as a distinct sounds, even though this is historically less plausible.
Another one that really threw me: in pretty much all variants of Ancient Greek, they distinguish between the letter P. We actually make both these sounds in English, but we don't write them differently or even realise we're saying it differently. It's the difference between the P in "pin" vs "spin" (say them both out loud right now - one is aspirated). Apparently, getting those mixed up to an Ancient Greek is like us mixing up S and SH. Important! But god I can't track it. So I don't make this distinction and I just say whichever P it would be in English. And so do 99.9% of native-English-speaker magicians
Post automatically merged:
There's a big problem here: most Americans in formal study were taught Erasmian pronunciation of Greek. Erasmus was explicitly NOT trying to reconstruct the original sound. We care about reconstructionism now, but they didn't back then. He was just trying to make something you could say clearly and distinguish between sounds. It served his purpose well, but not our purpose.
So a lot of people with formal study find it really hard to break out of that - even though it's dead, dead wrong. I don't know if there's a Latin equivalent of Erasmian pronunciation but I wouldn't put it past them.
Post automatically merged:
For the right frequency you might need a real live teacher. There are some chants I'd like to perform. But the old-fashioned system of notation the present-day authors use is a bit hard to wrap my ear around. And even having looked up their "classical modes" (Phyrgian, Dorian, etc.) I'm uncertain how to apply that to actual chanting.nah you good. pronouncing words and hitting the right "frequency" on a vowel is not the same
Post automatically merged:
Yeah: there's a saying in China, from the old days: "Walk three days and you need a new language."Some of the "Egyptian," "Hebrew", etc. words in the PGM are either words made-up to sound like they're from those languages, or are hopelessly garbled so that no one can figure out which words they were supposed to be. They use bits of Coptic Christian prayers (fun fact: the deity named most often in the PGM is Jesus). They are highly syncretic documents and it seems crazy to me to get scrupulous about pronunciation. I mean, just think about how any language works. Think of the language you speak. Does everyone speaking it today pronounce it the same way everywhere? Of course they don't, and this is an era of mass communication and mass literacy where grammar, spelling, pronunciation, etc. have been well standardized for most living languages.
Let's say some of these texts were written by Hellenized Egyptian priests. Would their spoken Greek have sounded the same as someone in Athens or Byzantium? Would a learned Rabbi be impressed with their Hebrew? Would the Coptic they spoke sound right to their forebears of centuries past?
Last edited: