I aspire as always to have my song adaptations recorded by talented performers, and those include the lyrics I adapt into ancient/classical tongues. Given that the demographic overlap between classicists and singers is probably so tiny as to create a needle-in-a-haystack situation, I will most likely have to forget about classical interest as a criterion, just enlist singers based solely on talent, and simply teach them the pronunciation.
To that end, I decided to create a user-friendly pronunciation guide for classical Attic Greek that I could use and re-use in any future recording projects. One of the challenges I faced was that there doesn't appear to be a single standard reconstruction. There are instead a prestigious few that tend to disagree mildly among themselves, particularly on the vowels (even if it's clear that you're dealing just with Attic rather than Homeric or Koine).
The model I ended up with (http://www.hsmespanol.com/Archaia_Hellenike_Phone.jpg) is based mostly on Allen's Vox Graeca as cited on Wikipedia, but I made a few tweaks based on other sources (such as H&Q's text, Batts and Henry's Teach Yourself Complete Ancient Greek, or my own intuitive experience with how long/short vowel pairs tend to work). In combining traits from multiple pronunciation systems, the goal was to approximate a sort of neutral, balanced compromise while still maintaining reasonably high accuracy as well.
I was wondering if anyone might have any thoughts on what I've come up with, so I'd like to share it in case anyone's interested. Constructive critique is welcome, both for the accuracy and balance of the information and the clarity of presentation. Thanks in advance!
To that end, I decided to create a user-friendly pronunciation guide for classical Attic Greek that I could use and re-use in any future recording projects. One of the challenges I faced was that there doesn't appear to be a single standard reconstruction. There are instead a prestigious few that tend to disagree mildly among themselves, particularly on the vowels (even if it's clear that you're dealing just with Attic rather than Homeric or Koine).
The model I ended up with (http://www.hsmespanol.com/Archaia_Hellenike_Phone.jpg) is based mostly on Allen's Vox Graeca as cited on Wikipedia, but I made a few tweaks based on other sources (such as H&Q's text, Batts and Henry's Teach Yourself Complete Ancient Greek, or my own intuitive experience with how long/short vowel pairs tend to work). In combining traits from multiple pronunciation systems, the goal was to approximate a sort of neutral, balanced compromise while still maintaining reasonably high accuracy as well.
I was wondering if anyone might have any thoughts on what I've come up with, so I'd like to share it in case anyone's interested. Constructive critique is welcome, both for the accuracy and balance of the information and the clarity of presentation. Thanks in advance!
