More on pronunciation.

The latest tantalizing bit comes to us from the turn of the 10th-11th centuries and the anonymously compiled lexicon known as the Suda (or Souda, or Suidas/Souidas). Actually it's a bit more than just a lexicon, incorporating a great deal of information better suited for an encyclopedia, including a wealth of material from the comic playwright Aristophanes. Astute readers of the Jersey Exile will recall that Aristophanes enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance in Byzantine educational circles owing to his Attic idiom, which became increasingly a challenge for students of Greek grammar. I never spent much time with his comedies while in school, as because he's considered so difficult for neophytes to penetrate nowadays he's the stuff of graduate seminars, usually only read by undergraduates in translation. There's some irony for you!

So back to the Suda - one of its "oddities" is that it is arranged in an alphabetic order that corresponds to the modern Greek pronunciation of the vowels. Again we are confronted with a Byzantine reference work, part of whose reason for existence is to instruct people in how to express themselves in proper Atticizing Greek, appearing to kowtow to demotic sensibilities, this time in its very principle of organization. This is almost a contradiction in terms. Why would the writers of the Suda have done this? Even if pronunciation had shifted significantly between the Classical and Byzantine periods, why would the teachers of "good" grammar and the champions of Atticism have accomodated such a lapse to this almost absurd extent? Something very odd is going on here, and I wonder if there are any decent Byzantine sources that discuss the matter of pronunciation directly. That the Byzantine Atticists shouldn't have cared about the "proper" pronunciation of the language while at the same time employing any possible means to torture their prose into what they thought was the style of Attica circa 400 B.C. suggests either one of two possibilities:

a. There was no significant difference in pronunciation; or

b. There was, but they didn't really care.

Even if it is the case that (b) is true, this is an extraordinary thing in its own right and instructive to our own latter day "hyperatticists" lording over Ancient Greek instruction here in the West. Since the Byzantines all of people didn't see the point of adopting a retro accent when reading the authors of their pagan past, why are we wasting our time with one? What's to be gained here, aside from a false sense of superiority over our fellow man and the Greeks of the present? Will I ever stop yammering on about this? Yes, when I've finally gone and written a book on the topic.