Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek

by W. Sidney Allen

This edition of Professor Allen's highly successful book is on the pronunciation of Attic Greek in classical times. In this third edition, Allen has revised the section on stress in classical Greek, the chapter on quantity has been recast, and the author has added an appendix on the names and letters of the Greek alphabet, to provide a parallel and historical background to the similar appendix in the second edition of his Vox Latina. The total amount of revision since the first edition has made it necessary to reset the whole book, so in addition to the new material, the supplementary notes of the second edition are now incorporated into the main text making this book much more convenient to use.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Classics, Nonfiction, 20th Century

188 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 1968

About the author

William Sidney Allen was a linguist and philologist.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone curious about how Greek actually sounded 2,500 years ago (quite different from how academics, especially in the English speaking world, typically pronounce it today), and essential reading for anyone interested in Ancient Greek poetry as poetry.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

VOX GRAECA is W. Sidney Allen's systematic reconstruction of the facts of Attic Greek pronunciation from a wide variety of ancient sources. It begins with a short explanation of common phonetic terms and then analyses first consonants, then vowels, then the Classical Greek tonal accent system. A series of appendices discusses the pronunciation of Greek in England as it was up to Allen's day, and this is still remarkably pertinent to contemporary instruction of pronunciation in the United States.

It must be repeated that VOX GRAECA is not a defence of the Erasmian pronunciation as some, mostly followers of the Modern Greek pronunciation who have never even read the work, have charged. It defends no pre-existing system. Rather, it is a reconstruction from the ground up like nothing before and proposes a system which (sadly) is not often found in academia. In Appendix B, "Selected Quotations", Allen lists numerous statements on pronunciation by ancient writers, and one can see the care by which he extracted a convincing and etymologically sound system from these works.

While VOX GRAECA is unparalled for its reliability, there are a few negative aspects. The first is that Allen makes a variance from IPA for no good reason, in for example using [y] instead of [j] for the palatal semivowel. And though IPA (with Allen's idiosyncracies) is used through most of the book, the quick-reference "Summary of Recommended Pronunciations" at the end gives examples with analogies to undependable Received Pronunciation English, French or German sounds ("o as German 'Gott'", "omega as English 'saw'"). Another aspect of the book that limits its usefulness is that Allen's coverage of changes is limited to only the classical period. He notes that many sounds have changed between Attic or Koine and Modern Greek, but as long as the change was after classical times, he sees no need to tell an exact timeframe for it.

VOX GRAECA, whatever its faults, is still the work of reference for Attic Greek pronunciation, and is a must-have for classicists and historical linguists. One hopes that a new, improved edition might be published someday, but in the meantime I highly recommend picking this up.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

The companion to Vox Latina , and where the violence Allen does to the IPA was just pointless in Vox Latina, here it is actively harmful and a constant source of confusion, both in the mind of the reader and in that of the author. Allen defends this violence on the grounds that Vox Graeca is "intended primarily for the classical and general reader rather than the technical linguist and phonetician", but since his descriptions of especially the vowels are endless streams of tedious high-jargon circumlocutions anyway, this is a particularly weak argument.

In terms of what he actually says there were, as before, no real surprises, though not having been taught Greek in school I can't comment on how well the reconstructed pronunciation matches what is actually taught today—if Appendix A is any indication, the situation for Greek was considerably worse than that for Latin as recently as 1984. I will say that while his treatment of the vowels is effectively uncontentious, his suggestions for close English analogues are all off-the-wall fucking bonkers: e.g. for ᾰ and ᾱ, he characterises those as being like the first two vowels in Italian amare (i.e. [a] and [aː], also my understanding), but then suggests the nearest English approximations are "the short [ʌ] in cup, and the long [ā] [sic, actually [ɑː]] in father"! Similarly for ε and ο he suggests "English pet and German Gott"—[ɛ] and [ɔ], when the whole point is that they're not: they're [e] and [o], as opposed to η [ɛː] and ω [ɔː], the reverse of the situation in Latin!
This absolute bullshit is largely limited to specific examples for the simple vowels (but then for all of them except υ), and the actual discussion is of higher quality. It's a very frustrating thing to see in what pretends to be a practical pronunciation guide, though, especially when Vox Latina was good enough to be considered canonical.

But yes, apart from that, Vox Graeca pretty much matched my understanding of Attic phonology (which I hope means it holds up), and it's certainly a conscientious if occasionally slightly rambling treatment of the subject matter. The diachronic trivia, while often vague, seemed plausible as well, but there have certainly been further developments in our understanding of the accent—that chapter was added in the second edition (1974) and partly updated for the third (1984), but the impression you get is that our understanding at the time was still very much in flux. I suppose a fourth edition isn't very likely.

[Phantoomer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Allen, in questo saggio, ricostruisce la fonologia della lingua greca parlata in Attica nel V sec. a.C. Questa ricostruzione è ancora valida e ben documentata da prove e attestazioni dell'epoca