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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek. For example, beta has changed pronunciation, becoming something like English v instead of English b like it was originally, but most modern Greeks will vehemently deny that the pronunciation has changed.

We have good evidence that it used to be like English b (voiced bilabial plosive):

https://www.foundalis.com/lan/betapro.htm

That's just one example. Native speakers are usually the worst at understanding and explaining their own language.

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But this isn't ancient Greek.

Yes I know about the Erasmus pronunciation and that it does not conform to how we talk nowadays. And I know most Greeks haven't ever heard about his theory. And I say theory because not everyone agrees with his proposed pronunciation.

But this here is another matter. Biblical texts are not in ancient Greek.

Edit: I actually said that the biblical texts are not in ancient Greek (in that the language had evolved from the time of Plato and other such texts) but to be honest I wasn't really sure about my statement. I tried to do a quick research and I might have been mistaken.

However about this particular prayer, although it is of course not in modern Greek, I do not think there are particular hard passages that are not understood without knowing any ancient Greek.

To build a bit further on this. The new testament is written in Koine Greek (Common Greek) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek . A lot of the phonological changes from attic to modern have already happened by the time these text were written.

For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.

Additionally I would like to point out that pronunciation has little to do with comprehension of written texts.

> For most Greek speakers texts from this time are mostly legible, words like epiousios not withstanding.

Is this true? As someone who studied classical Greek, I can mostly understand NT Koine OK, but most of modern Greek goes right over my head. Conversely (anecdote alert) I watched a YouTube video where a Greek guy took ancient texts out onto the streets of Athens and asked people to make sense of them; most people giggled self-consciously and admitted that while they had studied them in school they were able to make very little headway in actual translations.

Edit: so my point is that, to my naïve eye, Koine seems much closer to Attic than to Modern, and hence I'd expect modern Greeks to struggle with it - but would be very interested in being proved wrong :)

In my own limited experience in school, I found texts from the first century AD much easier to comprehend than say the odyssey, or even classical texts.

But still it was an academic exercise, it required attention and some time, it was far easier than classical texts yet not something you can do in the street on the fly.

I may have to pull back from mostly legible to mostly decode-able. ;)

I only really know some classical texts and, for Koine, just the NT, but the structure of the NT is so much more straightforward to understand - it's basically this happened, then that happened, etc etc and there is none of the "decoding" that you often have to do with the classical stuff. But I am fascinated by how much of this is intrinsic to the language and how much is down to artifice on the part of the classical writers. In other words, the audience for the NT is ordinary folks whose first language in many (most?) cases is not even Greek, so the message has to be written as plainly as possible (and actually the prose is kind of pedestrian as a result IMO). But what's the situation with classical authors? Are they really reflecting the speech of the time or are they using a more complex and artificial form of language divorced from daily speech? I don't know - I think there must be an element of it, but otoh someone like Aristophanes is trying to make audiences laugh so the language has to be relatable and idiomatic you would think.

This, exactly. The Greek alphabet is much older than Koine Greek, of almost 500 years. While spoken language tends to change fast, written language tends to stick and doesn't easily change, for obvious reasons (just look at English or Tibetan). People won't change how they write some word just because they pronounce it differently from the past, because that would make the text much harder to read.

Also, /b/, /β/ and /v/ have the tendency to get swap with each other in lots of languages, and most people fail to distinguish them apart unless their language imposes a clear distinction among them. See for instance how Italian or English distinguish /b/ from /v/, while /b/, /β/ and /v/ are all basically the same thing for a Spanish speaker.

Indeed Koine Greek is not ancient Greek, and while also being different from modern Greek, it's also different. The main difference being that Koine stems from the attic dialect and modern Greek from the dimotic dialect. To make matters even more complicated, the transition to make dimotic official happened in 1979 and thus there is still a living generation accustomed to read and write Koinè/kathareuousa Greek.

This familiarity didn't end overnight and as these things often do they live on in a long tail, see for example Russian influence in many ex-soviet republics which is only waning with the youngest generations, or for example German influence that lasted in northern Croatia way longer than the austro-hungarian domination.

That said, linguistics is full of traps. The common person on the street makes all sorts of assumption based on modern facets, often inverting the relationship between Prestige/low-education/provinciality with historical language change, i.e. often assuming that the poor illiterate provincial people are those who talk badly and distort the language, while in reality they often preserve archaic forms in some cases (while innovating in others).

An example from contemporary coastal Tuscany in Italy: in the local dialect the word for rabbit is "cunigliolo" while the offician Italian is "coniglio". If you ask a random person from the street they would tell you that "cunigliolo" is not only an uneducated form but actually a silly deformation of the right word and that it's obviously so, because the suffix "-olo" sounds funny (probably because of the influence of the names of the seven dwarves in Italian, brontolo, cucciolo, mammolo, pisolo, ... all designed to sound cute to the ear of a modern italiano speaker).

Turns out that the latin word for rabbit is "cuniculus".

Now, did I say that linguistics is tricky? Turns out that the "-olo" suffix has been added to other words as well, like "ragnolo" which has no etymological explaination. They could be an innovation to regularize the perceived "funny local way of saying rabbit", perhaps modeled on the 7 dwarves, or not. Perhaps cunigliolo etymology is also wrong and I'm grasping at straws, but I think my main point still holds: don't trust the gut reaction of native speakers for anything other than their living language.

I will disagree. I cannot see how a native speaker can be the worst at understanding their own language. Your own language is the one you understand best, and even though that is not directly the opposite statement, for your statement to be correct it would mean that statistically native speakers are of inferior understanding compared to others. When you take that to apply for all languages you would end up with a paradox. You give an example based on pronunciation, which does change for all languages, so I would not take knowledge of history of pronunciation to have anything to do with the instinctive understanding of concepts in your mother tongue. Now on the second part, I.e. the ability to explain, I would think it’s related to understanding, but it is more nuanced as it also has to do with knowledge of the language in which the explanation is articulated.

—-edit to add comment on pronunciation of β

On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.

I think what the OP means is that on average native speakers understand the language intuitively, while most of the non-natives were taught the rules and structure of the language directly. Being a non-native english speaker I experienced this often. I have never gotten a useful answer for a question about english from English people. It usually was "oh, I just feel which word is right"...

That’s why I separated the treatment of understanding and explaining. I would still argue that a native English speaker has better skills to explain an English word in English - on average.

I find the same. My wife is from another country and we find she has more command of my mother language’s rules and whys and viceversa.

For example she had a hard time expressing when does she say “oui” and when does she say “si”; being such a basic word (probably learnt at age 2), she never had to sit and try to infer the rule explicitly. Whereas every french-as-second-language speaker, this is a basic (explicit) rule that has been discussed in class and memorized before being internalized.

And having the rules more explicitly in the head enables hard reasoning over them, which goes beyond intuitiveness in some contexts.

>> On the specific pronunciation subject, I am no expert in the matter but I do wonder how that reconciles with the fact that the letters μπ make the sound b in Greek and that combination of letters is not modern but has been in Ancient Greek words too, such as in εμπνέω.

It's possible that "μπ" was not pronounced "b" as today, in ancient times, but as "mp". For example, I think Cypriot Greeks tend to pronounce another consontant dipthong, "ντ" as "nt" rather than "d".

> I generally distrust modern Greeks' knowledge about Ancient Greek

I'd find it fascinating that you would have encountered these discrepancies often enough to form such an opinion, assuming you're not involved in studies of or adjacent to ancient greek.

Can you highlight what OP got wrong?

Isn't this a tad exaggerated, jumping from the change in the pronunciation of one letter, to native speakers being the worst? I think you need considerably more proof than that.

I'm sure you didn't intend this as an insult but in the context of the comment you were responding to, it could have been expressed more kindly.

Unfortunately, an inflammatory grandiose generalization like "native speakers are the worst at understanding their own language" is likely to derail a thread altogether and turn itself into the (much less interesting) topic, so please let's all try to edit those out of our posts to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As a Greek myself I can confirm that most of us know almost nothing about ancient Greek and a lot of us think that they do because they have the mistaken impression that the two languages slightly differ.

To be fair though, i guess this happens in any language/ethnicity so it is better to leave science to the experts/scientists and take their opinion. And ancient Greek scientists are not necessarily Greeks as much as any random Greek speaker is not a linguist.

Know-it-all armchair Internet experts are always the worst at understanding and explaining anything, especially when they attempt so with scarce evidence.

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