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How It All Began

A typical question I am often asked (being a Greek abroad) is

"How similar is Modern Greek to Ancient Greek?"

This is a question that is not easily answered in a few words, but my favourite parallel is

"Closer than Italian is to Latin"

An Italian friend of mine assured me that Italian and Latin do not have much to do with each other. Of course, he was exaggerating, but it was his way of telling me that my answer was not very helpful (since Latin is not considered "ancient Italian"). I then had to be more specific and explain the differences in more detail:

• in terms of vocabulary, more than 50% survives in one form or another (e.g., "μυελός|marrow", "κρέας|meat" but "μητέρα|mother" instead of "μήτηρ", "πόλη|city" for "πόλις", etc);
• in terms of grammar, there was simplification of the declension (elimination of the dative case) and conjugation (reduction of the number of moods and voices, periphrastic formation of the perfect and future tenses), elimination of the infinitive, modification of the endings;
• in terms of syntax, subordinate clauses are more favoured now, modern prepositions are followed by accusative instead of genitive and dative; etc.

These are all easily verifiable by an inspection of the surviving ancient texts, inscriptions and (even) sayings (e.g., "Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ|Glory to God").

I also informed him that the pronunciation has changed and some letters were not pronounced in the same way they do today, similarly to the difference in the pronunciation between Latin and Italian. His natural reaction was

"How do they know that? Have they found any ancient recordings?"

Naïve as this statement might seem, it is tantamount to the innocent child's reasonable question

"If God created everything, then who created God?"

and deserves an equally reasonable answer instead of scorn.

A (not so) Solid Proof

One of the reasons for my friend’s reaction was the difference in pronunciation of Latin in Italy and in the rest of the world (let’s call it Vatican Latin vs Academic Latin). He mentioned that he was shocked to hear American students pronounce the famous Caesar quote

as

the last one sounding particularly awkward to his ears.

Since I had at times, both at school and through my own reading, become acquainted with some of the arguments in favour of the "true" pronunciation of ancient Greek and Latin, I seized the opportunity to proudly provide an "irrefutable proof" that this pronunciation was correct by stating that

in transliterated Greek words, Latin C represents Greek Κ ("Cerberus", "cynicus", etc), which has always been pronounced [k]; ergo C=[k].

Case closed, no appeals filed, the defendant (Vatican-Latin pronunciation) was found irrevocably guilty.

However, after this triumphant display of knowledge, I started having second thoughts about my "incontrovertible" proof:

1. How do we know that Greek Κ has always been pronounced [k]?

In fact, in present-day Greek, Κ has a palatal allophone [c] in front of [i] and [e]. In the Cretan dialect (very likely under Venetian influence), the pronunciation of this palatal allophone is between the (mainstream) Greek [c] (as in ‘κι’, ‘κε’) and the Italian [t͡ʃ] (as in ‘ci’, ‘ce’). The palatalisation of the velars (κ, g, γ, χ) before front vowels (ε, ι) is not a mere quirk of modern Greek. It is rather dictated by the physiology of the pronunciation of these particular sounds: the former (velars) involve the tongue (nearly) touching at the back of the mouth cavity, while the latter (front vowels) require a tongue position (well) clear of the back of the mouth; the pronunciation of these two sounds in immediate succession is particularly troublesome and it is, thus, reasonable that in most languages the point of (near) contact of the tongue is moved forward to minimise the tongue travel in this particular situation. In Greek, the new (moved at) point of contact is the hard palate (hence, the conversion of the "velar" to a "palatal"); the same can be said about other languages that are thought to "preserve" the velar nature of [k] even before front vowels, such as German or English (I have yet to hear a German say [kino] qino for "Kino" or a Brit say [kil] qill for "kill"; the actual pronunciations are rather clearly [cino] kino^{source LEO} and [cil] kill^{source LEO}, respectively, albeit with a touch of "aspiration"). The same is true about Romance languages, such as French ("qui|who"_[FRA] qui^{source LEO}, "quai|dock, quay"_[FRA] quai^{source LEO}) and Italian ("chi|who"_[ITA] chi^{source LEO}, "che|that"_[ITA] che^{source LEO}) and to a lesser extent in Spanish ("quién|who"_[SPA] quien^{source LEO}, "qué|what"_[SPA] que^{source LEO}) where the actual sound is rather an intermediate velar-palatal.cf. WILS05, p. 948, "It is well-known that in many languages the velar stop consonants [k] and [g] are articulated further forward on the palate when they appear immediately before front vowels such as [i] and [e] than when they appear immediately before back vowels such as [ɑ]" including English and "'[t]he more front the vowel, the more front the velar' (p. 89) holds in all of the languages for which data were available" with reference to "Keating and Lahiri (1993)" If all these modern languages exhibit a palatal (or at least more "forward") allophone of /k/ before front vowels, why should it be excluded that Greek of the time of adoption of the aforementioned transliterated Greek words into Latin had a similar allophone? Since there is at least the possibility that Greek Κ represented a different sound in front of different vowels, it is also likely that Latin C was pronounced in a similar fashion and, before front vowels, it assumed a palatal (as in Greek), alveolo-palatal (as in Cretan) or even palato-alveolar (as in Italian) value.

2. How can the evidence from modern languages be explained?

As far as I can tell, none of the modern Romance languages "preserves" [ke], [ki] (not even [ce], [ci]) for original "CE" and "CI" (even if there are a few examples where they do, they are exactly that: a few). Thus in these languages, the point of contact for original "CE" and "CI" is pushed even further forward (than the hard palate), ranging from palato-alveolar affricate [t͡ʃ] in Italian and Romanian to (almost alveolar) sibilant [s] in French and Portuguese to dental fricative [θ] in Spanish. How can these forward values be explained on the basis of a pure velar Latin "C"? Wouldn't it make more sense if the original value of "C" were somewhere in the middle of all these modern sounds? The only case of a pure velar immediately followed by a front vowel are the Spanish syllables "je", "ji", "ge", "gi" (e.g., "Jerusalem"_[SPA], "mojito"_[SPA], "gente|people"_[SPA], "gitano|gypsy"_[SPA]), which are not relevant for the determination of the pronunciation of Latin C.

3. What about some phenomena that would be better explained by the Vatican Latin pronunciation?
• Possible etymologies for the word "guitar" (corresponding to Latin "cithara"_[LAT], another Κ→C transliteration from Greek "κιθάρα"), include the Old Persian "sihtar" or Assyrian "chetarah". It is more reasonable to argue in favour of a palato-alveolar or alveolo-palatal value of "Κ" being used to render the "s" or "ch" of the word of origin rather than to maintain that the initial (sibilant) alveolar or palato-alveolar sound was transformed to a velar (the various modern pronunciations of the instrument's name are not very helpful in this case, since they all seem to be coming from Arabic through Spanish).
• According to ALLE78, p. 15, "In early Latin inscriptions C tends only to be used before I and E, K before consonants and A ..., and Q before O and U". There cannot be a more clear indication of a different pronunciation of the same "letter" C/K/Q according to environment. The (later) use of C in all cases could have been due to the Romans discovering the principle of allophony,cf. ALLE87, p. 8, "What is required is not one symbol per sound, but one symbol (or combination of symbols) per PHONEME". the original non-velar sound of C not existing before [a], [o], [u] (the modern practice of writing "CIA", "CIO", "CIU", as in "ciao|hello/bye"_[ITA] ciao^{source LEO} and "ciuccio|soother/pacifier"_[ITA] ciuccio^{source LEO}, for the [t͡ʃ] sound before back vowels is almost certainly an Italian development).
• During a visit in the archaeological museum of my hometown, I saw a Greek inscription from 49 AD where C was used instead of Σ ([s]). This is a typical "Byzantine" practice (whence the Cyrillic C for [s]) and very reminiscent of the "soft C" of French and English, but I never expected that it would be used already during early Roman times. While it might have been a matter of coincidence through calligraphy, it is also possible that the reason for this practice was that the sound of Latin C was or came close to that of Greek Σ. I later found out that this practice is even older, from the 4th c. BC, so it cannot have anything to do with Latin C and its pronunciation. While this argument does not hold water, I do not intend, in this chapter, to provide arguments in favour of the Italian pronunciation of Latin C, but merely to list all facts that shook my belief in the traditional proofs, like the one I provided above. So, it is only for… historical reasons that I keep the "lunate C" observation in this list; otherwise, my intention is not to introduce any dubious arguments like this one on my own motion but only to discuss (and quickly do away with) them, if they have been submitted by the proponents of one of the rivaling theories.
4. Isn't "Greek Κ" too broad a term for a language with so many dialects?

As will be explained later, there is no such thing as "ancient Greek language" (singular), but only "ancient Greek languages" or rather "ancient Greek dialects" (plural), for under the umbrella term "Greek" we classify a large number of (undoubtedly related, but with considerable differences in morphology and phonology) dialects. This includes the (so-thought) "primary" dialect groups of Ionic, Doric and Aeolic, each comprising several (at times quite distinct) dialects, such as Attic, Boeotian, Thessalian and some tens of others. Even though Attic eventually prevailed and can rightfully be considered to be the more representative dialect, it should be emphasised that the variety of Greek that lent Greek words to Latin was rarely mainstream (Attic or even later "Κοινή|Common") Greek, but rather some sort of Doric (cf. "machina|machine"_[LAT], "Creta|Crete"_[LAT] for Attic "μηχανή", "Κρήτη"). Even if it can be proved beyond doubt that Attic or Κοινή retained the velar sound of Κ even before front vowels, we would still not be certain that this was also the case for the Greek dialect that Latin borrowed words from.

5. Why does Latin transliteration have to preserve the original Greek pronunciation?

Even if the phonetic value of Greek Κ were always [k], this would not mean that its counterpart in Latin transliterations (C) also had the same value. For instance, assume that, at the time of adoption of the aforementioned Greek words, Latin already made use of a palato-alveolar affricate allophone of "C" before front vowels (as in modern Italian). How would the Latin speakers write the Greek sound [k] before [e] and [i]? It seems that they would have no choice but to use C (the convention of writing CHI and CHE for [ki] and [ke], or rather [ci] and [ce], must be an Italian innovation). A modern parallel is the rendering of the Spanish syllables "je", "ji", "ge", "gi" (which are purely velar) into Greek as "χε" and "χι" (which are palatal): the most correct Greek rendering of "gitano" gitano^{source LEO} and "gente" gente^{source LEO} is "χιτάνο" xitano and "χέντε" xente, even though Greeks unavoidably read them with a palatal Χ (and the latter with a voiced τ=[d]); there is no way (and no interest) in Greek to render a purely velar Χ before a front vowel.

These considerations should be enough to at least cast doubt on the soundness of the usual one-liners (such as the one I used above) that "prove" a matter so involved as the (no longer attested) pronunciation of an old language and are superficially and naively adopted by most of us. Going back to my "incontrovertible" argumentation about the pronunciation of Latin C, in order to identify its weak points, this can be broken down into the following logical steps:

1. Transliterated Greek words into Latin have C in lieu of Κ.
2. Greek Κ had always a velar value [k].
3. The "transliterator" intended to represent the exact sound of the (mainstream/Attic) Greek Κ.

Quest for the Truth

Realising that my argument was rather flimsy and being unable to come up with a solid proof about such a simple matter (the pronunciation of Latin C), I started wondering what kind of scientific methods were used to reconstruct the pronunciation of ancient languages such as Latin, Attic and Κοινή. There had to be a more scientific way of proving the letter values of the ancient language. I thus embarked on a quest to train myself in the ways of the Grand Masters of ancient phonology, so that I am in a better position to defend the reconstructed against the "corrupted" modern phonology.

Having been (rather heavily) involved in the study of my own mother tongue, my main focus was on the "reconstructed ancient Greek phonology". I did not care about the pronunciation of Latin, Sanskrit or prehistoric Kartvelian (although these are often intertwined to such an extend that it is next to impossible to verify: e.g., "Greek $ was pronounced as [€], because it corresponds to Sanskrit ¥, which, as we know, had the value [€]", not being clear whether the latter "knowledge" comes from some obscure Indian grammarian of an unspecified date or from recursive association of Sanskrit ¥ with Greek $, which is... assumed to have had the value [€]).

As of March 2011, I have spent two years researching this topic (which is by no means sufficient to justify a thorough, ground-breaking scholarly work, but, as I am not seeking to make any money or career out of it, I hope that it is indicative of my commitment). The result of this investigation was, at times, disappointing.

• I realised that there was not one, but tens of "reconstructed" ancient-Greek pronunciations, each with a sizeable number of supporters. Some of them diverged little (if at all) from the modern phonology, some rather clearly reflected attempts to ascribe (let's say) Central-European values to Greek letters and some attempted to distance the ancient voice as much as possible from the modern (the popular pronunciation in contemporary academic circles belonging rather to the latter category).
• Sometimes the reconstructions of ancient phonology (of all three categories mentioned above) were as "scientific" as was the restoration of "Minoan" wall art by the Gilliérons & Co.: a lot relied on the artistic imagination of the "restorer"; when the data were insufficient or inconclusive, the "restorer" did not hesitate to let his fantasy or personal preference fill the gap.
• I often found myself wondering how people could fall for such naïve argumentation and why they ignored what was in front of their eyes: "Can’t they see the emperor is naked?". Suddenly, my amateurish approach to the pronunciation of Latin C seemed more professional than the methods employed in the "world of (linguistic) science".

As for the title of the main page (Orthodox or Catholic?), the reason is quite simple. In almost every case, I realised that what I, coming from the world of mathematics, consider to be “scientific proof” is far from what is regarded as such in the world of linguistics. In fact, the methods employed by all parties appear to relate to rhetoric rather than hard-core science. In the end, it is a question of providing convincing arguments rather than unequivocal proofs and often giving credence to the various theories is a product of faith rather than reason. However, faith is not a tool of science, but rather of a rivaling discipline:

Religion!

Which brings us to the next chapter.

Notes