Breathings

Consonants

Vowels

The information presented here is essentially the same as the core information in Unit 1 of Introduction to Attic Greek, but broken into smaller chunks and provided with audio examples. The aim is to discuss the pronunciation of Attic Greek in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. Pronunciation was shifting during this period, and shifted further over the following centuries of the history of Greek. The discussion is indebted to W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca: a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek (3rd edition, 1987) and other sources.

The recommendations given here reflect a commonly-adopted pedagogically practical compromise involving the admixture of the treatment of some sounds as they developed in late classical or postclassical pronunciation. One may attempt a more purist pronunciation (for instance of theta and phi), but this has been found to cause many students to commit spelling errors that are avoided with the compromise system. In the following, a letter or group of letters in square brackets, such as [u], represents a phonetic transcription based on conventional values in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

On the pages of this module, the sounds are embedded in the page, and are downloaded when the page is loaded before you begin to click on words to hear the sounds. Thus on a slow connection or on a page with many embedded sounds (like the Alpha page), the page will take some time to draw: please be patient and let the page load fully before clicking on words. Once the page is finished loading, you should not have any delays in hearing sounds when you click. Playing the sounds relies on the QuickTime plugin. If you do not have the needed plugin already, your browser should detect the lack and help you download it. The sounds of this module will not play on iOS devices.