Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching

However, there is often no mention of the ancient aspirate pronunciations of θ, φ and χ, which were different from the modern fricative values.

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.

They independently proposed a reconstructed pronunciation of both Greek and Latin that was similar to Erasmus's scheme, and it became adopted in schools.

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.

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.

It is similar to the reconstructed system advocated in England and Wales by Arnold and Conway,[4] 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.

[citation needed] The teaching of Greek is based on a roughly Erasmian model, but in practice, it is heavily skewed towards the phonological system of German or the other host language.

The distinctive length of double vs. single consonants is usually not observed, and German patterns of vowel length interrelating with the closedness and the openness of syllables may affect the realisation of Greek vowels before consonant clusters, even in stressed syllables: ε, η = [ɛ] ~ [eː]; ο, ω = [ɔ] ~ [oː]; ι, ῑ = [ɪ] ~ [iː]; υ, ῡ = [ʏ] ~ [yː]; ου = [ʊ] ~ [uː].

In reading poetry, it is customary to render the scansion patterns by strong dynamic accents on the long syllables, despite the natural accentuation of the words, not by the actual length.

Vowel length distinction, geminate consonants and pitch accent are discarded completely, which matches the current phonology of Standard French.

The reference Greek-French dictionary, Dictionnaire Grec-Français by A. Bailly et al., does not even bother to indicate vowel length in long syllables.

[citation needed] Short-element υ diphthongs αυ and ευ are pronounced like similar-looking French pseudo-diphthongs au and eu: [o]~[ɔ] and [ø]~[œ], respectively.

More generally, no attempt is made to reproduce the unwritten allophones thought to have existed by modern scholarly research.

One particularly famed piece of schoolyard Greek in France is the line, supposedly by Xenophon, "they did not take the city, for hope said bad things" (οὐκ ἔλαβον πόλιν· άλλα γὰρ ἐλπὶς ἔφη κακά, ouk élabon pólin; álla gàr elpìs éphē kaká).