Ancient Greek has been pronounced in various ways by those studying Ancient Greek literature in various times and places. This article covers those pronunciations; the modern scholarly reconstruction of its ancient pronunciation is covered in Ancient Greek phonology.
Greek world
Among speakers of Modern Greek, from the Byzantine Empire to modern Greece, Cyprus, and the Greek diaspora, Greek texts from every period have always been pronounced by using the contemporaneous local Greek pronunciation. That makes it easy to recognize the many words that have remained the same or similar in written form from one period to another. Among Classical scholars, it is often called the Reuchlinian pronunciation, after the Renaissance scholar Johann Reuchlin, who defended its use in the West in the 16th century. Nevertheless, Greek textbooks for secondary education give a summary description of the reconstructed pronunciation of Ancient Greek. That includes the differentiation between short and long vowels and between the various accents; the pronunciation of the spiritus asper as /h/ and the pronunciation of β, γ and δ as plosives and of diphthongs as such. However, there is often no mention of the ancient aspirate pronunciations of θ, φ and χ, which were different from the modern fricative values.
Eastern Orthodox Church The theology faculties and schools related to or belonging to the Eastern Orthodox Church use the modern Greek pronunciation to follow the tradition of the Byzantine Empire.
Renaissance scholarship
The study of Greek in the West expanded considerably during the Renaissance, in particular after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when many Byzantine Greek scholars came to Western Europe. Greek texts were then universally pronounced with the medieval pronunciation that still survives intact. From about 1486, various scholars (notably Antonio of Lebrixa, Girolamo Aleandro, and Aldus Manutius) judged that the pronunciation was inconsistent with the descriptions that were handed down by ancient grammarians, and they suggested alternative pronunciations. This work culminated in Erasmus's dialogue De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528). The system that he proposed is called the Erasmian pronunciation.
England and the United States In 1540, John Cheke and Thomas Smith became Regius Professors at Cambridge. They independently proposed a reconstructed pronunciation of both Greek and Latin that was similar to Erasmus's scheme, and it became adopted in schools, replacing the modern Greek pronunciation in use. Soon after the Cheke and Smith reforms, English underwent the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the phonetic values assigned to the English "long vowels", in particular. The same changes affected the English pronunciation of Greek, which thus became further removed from both Ancient Greek and from the Greek that was pronounced in other western countries. A further peculiarity of the English pronunciation of Ancient Greek occurred as a result of the work of Isaac Vossius. He maintained in an anonymously published treatise that the written accents of Greek did not reflect the original pronunciation. Moreover, Henninius (Heinrich Christian Henning) published Dissertatio Paradoxa, which claimed that accentuation in Ancient Greek must follow the same principles as in Latin, a view that is now universally considered to be erroneous. It is generally accepted that the accented syllable in Ancient Greek is the one carrying the written accent, but most authorities consider that it was a pitch accent, rather than the Modern Greek stress accent. Henninius's has affected the pronunciation taught in schools in the UK and the Netherlands but has been resisted in the United States and other countries. Thus, by the mid-19th century, the pronunciation of Ancient Greek in British schools was quite different from Modern Greek, from the reconstructed pronunciation of Ancient Greek and from the pronunciation used in other countries. The Classical Association, therefore, promulgated a new pronunciation as described by W. Sidney Allen in 1987, based on the reconstructed ancient pronunciation, which is now generally in use in British schools. The reforms in the pronunciation of Ancient Greek in schools have not affected the pronunciation of individual Greek-derived words in English itself, and there is now considerable variation in the English pronunciation (and indeed spelling) of the names of Ancient Greek historical or mythological personages or places (see English words of Greek origin). In the United States, an 1898 description by Peck gives a pronunciation system said to be prevalent at the time. It is similar to the reconstructed system advocated in England and Wales by Arnold and Conway, but with some differences in the pronunciation of the vowels. Assuming a typical American accent as an interpretation of Peck's English-language examples, the vowels α, ι, and ο/ω are pronounced as IPA /a/, /ɪ/, and /o/ (father, king, note), and for these three letters length influences only the temporal duration. Η is /e/ (fate) rather than /e̞/. Υ is /u/ instead of /y/ (while still others use /ʊ/). Another twentieth century text gives almost the same pronunciations as Peck's, except for ει (/eɪ/ rather than /ɛɪ/) and υι (/wi/ rather than /wɪ/).
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