Breathings, Accents and Sound

Paul's subject in 1 Corinthians 14 is the use of tongues in the church's gatherings, and churches today read what he says about tongues in different ways, as other tracks in this course explain. But the principle he lays down along the way is not in dispute. A flute is no use to a dancer if its notes run together; a trumpet is no use to an army if nobody can tell whether it is sounding the advance. The SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) says in 14:7 that the instruments must give διαστολὴν τοῖς φθόγγοις (diastolēn tois phthongois, a distinction in the sounds). Then 14:9 applies it to speech: unless you give εὔσημον λόγον (eusēmon logon, a clear word), πῶς γνωσθήσεται τὸ λαλούμενον; (pōs gnōsthēsetai to laloumenon? how will what is being said be known?). The verb γνωσθήσεται is future passive indicative, third person singular, of γινώσκω (ginōskō, I know), the verb you met in Acts 21:37; τὸ λαλούμενον is a present passive participle, nominative neuter singular, of λαλέω (laleō, I speak), with the article: the thing being spoken. Without clarity, Paul says, ἔσεσθε γὰρ εἰς ἀέρα λαλοῦντες (esesthe gar eis aera lalountes, for you will be speaking into the air).

That is why a lesson about small marks begins with this verse. The breathings, accents and punctuation of a Greek edition are aids to clear sound and clear sense. They tell a reader where an h belongs, which syllable to stress, which of two words that look alike is meant, and where a question ends. Most of them were not written by the apostles; they were added over centuries by scholars and scribes who wanted the text to be read aloud correctly and understood. You should know which marks are which, what each one tells you, and which of them involve an editor's judgment.

Notice, too, the Greek question mark at the end of the middle clause: πῶς γνωσθήσεται τὸ λαλούμενον; ends with what looks like an English semicolon. It is a question mark, and section 4 explains it. You have already met it once, in the commander's question in Acts 21:37.

Every Greek word that begins with a vowel or a diphthong carries a breathing mark. There are two. The smooth breathing, ᾿, looks like a small apostrophe or a comma raised above the letter, curving to the left: ἐ. It means nothing is added; you simply begin with the vowel. The rough breathing, ῾, curves the other way, like a backward apostrophe: ἑ. It means you put an h sound before the vowel, and it is transliterated h. That is the whole system. The two marks probably descend from the two halves of an old letter for h, and they were added to texts by scholars of the Hellenistic period. Most early New Testament manuscripts do not have them at all.

Hold your notebook open and look at these words, all of which you can now read. ἐν (en, in), smooth. ἕν (hen, one), rough. ἐγώ (egō, I), smooth. ἡμέρα (hēmera, day), rough. ἀγάπη (agapē, love), smooth. ἁμαρτία (hamartia, sin), rough. ἅγιος (hagios, holy), rough, which is why English has hagiography. Ἑλληνιστί (Hellēnisti, in Greek), rough, which is why English says Hellenistic and not Ellenistic. ὑμεῖς (hymeis, you, plural), rough. ὕδωρ (hydōr, water), rough. ὁ (ho, the) and ἡ (hē, the), both rough, and you will meet them in almost every verse.

Three rules tell you where the breathing goes. First, on a small letter it sits above the letter: ἐ, ἁ. On a capital it sits just before the letter, to its upper left: Ἐν, Ἑλληνιστί, Ἰησοῦς. Second, on a diphthong it sits over the second vowel, not the first: εὔσημον, οὐρανός, υἱός, αὐτός (autos, he, himself). That is what you found in the inquiry; the mark belongs to the whole sound but is written on its second letter. Third, two letters always take the rough breathing when they begin a word. Every initial upsilon is rough, so ὑ is always hy and υἱ always hui. And every initial rho is rough, ῥ, transliterated rh, which is why English writes rhetoric and rhythm: ῥῆμα (rhēma, word, saying) is an example.

Breathings change meaning more often than beginners expect. You found ἕν and ἐν in the inquiry. Another pair is οὐ (ou, not), smooth, and οὗ (hou, where, or of whom), rough; in Matthew 2:9 the star stops ἐπάνω οὗ ἦν τὸ παιδίον (epanō hou ēn to paidion, over where the child was). The article ὁ (ho, the) has a rough breathing and no accent; the relative pronoun ὅ (ho, which) has a rough breathing and an accent. When you copy a word into your notebook, copy its breathing as carefully as its letters. When a tool shows you a word, look at the breathing before you look at the gloss.

Most Greek words also carry an accent. There are three, and they look like this. The acute, ´, slants up to the right: λόγος. The grave, `, slants down to the right: καὶ. The circumflex, ˜, is a small wave or cap: ἦν, Ἰησοῦς. When a word has both a breathing and an accent on the same letter, the breathing comes first and the accent beside or above it, as in ἕν or εὔσημον. An accent can only stand on one of the last three syllables of a word, and the circumflex only on a long vowel or a diphthong.

In classical Greek the accents marked pitch: the voice rose on the acute, fell on the grave, and rose and fell on the circumflex. During the centuries around the New Testament, Greek moved from a pitch accent to a stress accent, the kind English has, and the accent marks came to show which syllable is spoken more strongly. Tradition credits Aristophanes of Byzantium, the librarian of Alexandria around 200 BC, with inventing the marks to help foreigners pronounce classical poetry. They were not used regularly in copying the New Testament until the Middle Ages, and the earliest manuscripts have almost none. The accents in your printed edition are therefore the work of later scribes and modern editors, applying rules that were worked out with great care, and they are almost always right; but they are not part of what Paul or John wrote down.

For this track you need to know three things about accents, and no more. First, how to read them: whichever kind of accent it is, stress the syllable it stands on. λόγος is LO-gos; ἀλήθεια is a-LĒ-thei-a; Ἰησοῦς is i-ē-SOUS. Second, why an acute sometimes becomes a grave: when a word with an acute on its last syllable is followed directly by another word, with no punctuation between them, the acute is written as a grave. That is why the dictionary form is καί but Romans 7:12 has ἁγία καὶ δικαία καὶ ἀγαθή, and why John 1:1 prints πρὸς τὸν θεόν (pros ton theon, with God): πρός and τόν are each followed by another word, so their acutes become graves, while θεόν stands before a comma and keeps its acute. The words and their meanings are unchanged; only the mark changes. Third, that some short words have no accent of their own and lean on the word before them, which may then get a second accent; grammars call them enclitics, and when you see a word with two accents, that is why. You do not need to learn the rules for where accents go. The editors have done that, and the tools show it.

But accents do sometimes tell you which word you are reading, and those are the cases to watch. εἰ (ei, if) and εἶ (ei, you are) differ only in the accent: John 11:21, εἰ ἦς ὧδε (ei ēs hōde, if you had been here), against John 4:19, προφήτης εἶ σύ (prophētēs ei sy, you are a prophet). The article ἡ (hē, the) has no accent, while ἤ (ē, or) has a smooth breathing and an accent; in Matthew 5:18 Jesus speaks of ἰῶτα ἓν ἢ μία κεραία (iōta hen ē mia keraia, one iota or one stroke), which uses both ἓν, one, and ἢ, or, side by side. τίς with an accent asks who? or what?, while τις without one means someone or anyone. In each case the tool will show you the right word and its gloss. Your job is to notice that the marks are different and to let them tell you which word it is.

Greek editions use four main punctuation marks, and two of them will catch you out. The comma, ',', and the full stop, '.', look and work as in English. The raised dot, '·', set high on the line, works like an English colon or semicolon, marking a pause stronger than a comma; you will often see it before a quotation, as in Acts 21:37, ὁ δὲ ἔφη· Ἑλληνιστὶ γινώσκεις; (ho de ephē, Hellēnisti ginōskeis? and he said, do you know Greek?). And the mark that looks like an English semicolon, ';', is the Greek question mark. Whenever you see ; in a Greek text, the sentence before it is a question. There is no Greek exclamation mark; editors leave exclamations to the reader.

There is one more mark you will see constantly. When a short word ending in a vowel stands before a word beginning with a vowel, Greek often drops the first vowel and marks the place with an apostrophe. This is called elision. In John 1:3, all things were made δι’ αὐτοῦ (di' autou, through him), where δι’ is the preposition διά with its final alpha dropped. ἀλλ’ for ἀλλά (alla, but) and ἀπ’ for ἀπό (apo, from) are others. When a tool shows you a word ending in an apostrophe, the dictionary form has one more vowel.

Now the most important fact in this lesson. The earliest manuscripts of the New Testament had almost no punctuation and no spaces between words. Every comma, full stop and question mark in your Greek edition, and in your English Bible, has been placed by an editor who decided where one sentence ended and the next began. Almost always the decision is obvious. Occasionally it is not, and then translations differ, not because they read different Greek words, but because they punctuate the same words differently.

Here is a small example and a large one. In John 14:2, the BSB has Jesus ask a question: 'If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?' The KJV makes it a statement: 'if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.' Two things are going on. Most early manuscripts have the small word ὅτι (hoti, that) after the words for I would have told you, and the later manuscripts behind the KJV leave it out, which makes the KJV's two separate sentences natural. But even editors who print ὅτι punctuate it differently: the BSB reads a question, while the SBLGNT ends the sentence with a raised dot, not a question mark, so that it reads as a statement. The Greek words alone allow either, and the editor's mark decides how you hear Jesus.

The large example is Romans 9:5. Paul lists Israel's privileges and ends with the Messiah, 'from them proceeds the human descent of Christ,' and then come words about God over all, blessed forever. Where does the sentence end? On the first reading, which the BSB and the KJV follow, the words continue the sentence: Christ, who is God over all. Its defenders point out that this is the natural way to read a Greek phrase that follows a noun directly, that Paul's independent blessings of God elsewhere normally put the word blessed first and this one does not, and that the phrase about Christ's human descent invites a contrast with what he is beyond it. Bruce Metzger was among the scholars who argued for it. On the second reading, an editor puts a full stop after Christ, and the rest becomes a separate praise of God the Father: God, who is over all, be blessed forever. Its defenders point out that Paul nowhere else plainly calls Christ θεός (theos, God), that he usually distinguishes God and the Lord Jesus Christ in the same breath, and that breaking into praise of God after a list of his gifts is very like Paul. Some translations follow this reading in their text and others mention it in a footnote. The deity of Christ does not hang on this verse, and those who take the second reading may hold it as firmly as anyone, from other texts. The point for you is narrower. Greek words alone cannot settle this; the question is how to punctuate them, and that is an editor's judgment you are entitled to weigh.

There is no recording of the apostles. What we know of how Koine sounded comes from spelling mistakes in papyri, from the way Greek words were written in other alphabets, and from the history of the language down to modern Greek. Out of that evidence, three ways of pronouncing New Testament Greek are in use today. Two are common, and a student should understand both well enough to respect the people who use the other one.

The first is the classroom or Erasmian pronunciation, named after the Dutch scholar Erasmus, who argued in his dialogue On the Right Pronunciation of Latin and Greek (1528) that ancient Greek must have sounded different from the Greek of his day. It is the system taught in most English-speaking seminaries and used in Lessons 2 and 3. Its great strength is that it gives every vowel and diphthong its own sound, so that η, ι, υ, ει and οι are all different to the ear. That helps a learner to spell, to memorise endings, and to hear grammatical differences that would otherwise sound alike: ἡμεῖς (hēmeis, we) and ὑμεῖς (hymeis, you, plural) are easy to tell apart in this system and identical in modern Greek. Almost every textbook, flashcard set and recording made for English-speaking students uses it. Its weakness is that no one ever spoke Greek quite this way. It is a scholar's reconstruction, applied differently in different countries, so that an English and a German Erasmian do not sound alike, and it sets the student apart from the living Greek-speaking church.

The second is modern Greek pronunciation, used by Greek speakers and by the Greek Orthodox Church, which has read the New Testament aloud in its liturgy without a break since the first centuries. Its great strength is that it is a living tradition, not a reconstruction, and that many of its sound changes had already begun in the Koine period. The papyri show it: Egyptian letter-writers of the first and second centuries often confused ει and ι, and αι and ε, which they could only do if those pairs already sounded alike, as they do in modern Greek. A student who learns this system can listen to Greek believers read the Gospel, and can speak with them. Its weakness for a learner is that it merges many sounds. η, ι, υ, ει, οι and υι are all sounded ee, so a learner cannot tell from the sound alone which letters to write, and endings that differ on the page may sound the same. Some of those mergers also came centuries after the New Testament, so modern pronunciation is not the apostles' pronunciation either.

A third approach, smaller but growing, tries to reconstruct the Koine of the first century itself from the evidence of the papyri. Randall Buth and the Biblical Language Center have been its best-known advocates, and they teach it as part of a method of learning Greek by hearing and speaking it. Its strength is historical ambition; its weakness is that every reconstruction is uncertain in places, and fewer resources use it.

That evidence about merging sounds has one practical result for you. When later scribes copied manuscripts, sometimes by dictation and sometimes by sounding the words to themselves, they occasionally wrote the wrong letter for a sound. Some textual variants come from this. In 1 John 1:4 manuscripts differ between ἡμῶν (hēmōn, our) and ὑμῶν (hymōn, your), which is why the BSB has 'so that our joy may be complete' and the KJV 'that your joy may be full.' In Romans 5:1 they differ between ἔχομεν (echomen, we have) and ἔχωμεν (echōmen, let us have), one letter, omicron or omega. The BSB reads 'we have peace with God.' Module 8 shows how such variants are weighed. For now, notice that the history of Greek sound is not only a classroom question.

Which should you use? Use the system your teacher, your textbook or your recordings use, because consistency matters far more than the choice. If you have no teacher and will learn mostly from the free tools and English-language resources, the classroom pronunciation will make the letters easiest to keep apart. If you live near Greek-speaking Christians, or want to hear the New Testament read aloud by people who speak the language, modern pronunciation has real advantages. Do not mock the other system, and do not treat yours as the sound of heaven. Paul's concern was that the hearer understand.

Turn to your My passage page. You have the first verse of your passage copied in Greek, with your own transliteration underneath. Now go through the Greek word by word and check every breathing and accent against the Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible interlinear, correcting your copy where you left a mark out. Then do three things with a coloured pen or pencil if you have one, or by underlining if you do not. Circle every rough breathing and check that your transliteration has an h there. Underline the accented syllable of every word. And mark every punctuation mark, especially any ; or ·, noting beside it what it means.

Next, go back to your transliteration and correct it. Wherever there is a rough breathing, put the h in; wherever there is an iota subscript, make sure you copied it in the Greek line; wherever a diphthong carries the breathing on its second letter, check that you transliterated both letters. Write the accented syllable of each word in capitals in the transliteration, as this lesson did with LO-gos, so that your transliteration also tells you where to put the stress.

Now read the verse aloud, slowly, stressing the accented syllables, three times. Then use your phone's voice recorder, which nearly every phone has and which costs nothing, to record yourself reading it once. Listen back. Mark in your notebook any word where you hesitated or where you are not sure you said a letter right, and look at those words again tomorrow. Keep the recording; at the end of this track you will record the same verse again, and the difference will encourage you.

Last, write one line at the bottom of the page: My pronunciation. Beside it write classroom or modern, whichever you have decided to use, and one sentence on why. Then write out 1 Corinthians 14:9 in the BSB beneath it, as a reminder of what all of this is for. When you read Greek aloud in front of others, you are not trying to sound learned. You are trying, as Paul asked, to give a clear word.