Thursday, July 10, 2025

Ben Kantor's Reconstructed "Early High Koine" Greek Pronunciation

Because of a project, I've had to wade a little into Ben Kantor's recent, unbelievable, staggeringly detailed work on the pronunciation of Greek in Judeo-Palestine at the time of Christ (long version, short version). He's mostly reconstructed it on the basis of misspellings (which reveals what sounded the same). He's used computers to process all the data.

Man, I feel old. So far, I haven't found anywhere where the darn thing is summarized in a user friendly way (including in his own book!!!). There are YouTube videos but they just seem to rant on and on about the project. They never seem to get to the summary I'm looking for.

So, here is a shot at summarizing. I call on the scholarly forces of the universe to correct me.



1 comment:

Ken Schenck said...

The beta was already going a little fricative (toward v) and the gamma was already fading a little toward y. I call on the brilliant to advise.