[fifnir]

Hi, are you saying this with a some linguistic expertise ?

As a Greek without much background in linguistics etc I noticed a some pretty strong mistakes (to my ear) and since the original is pretty understandable to me I assume (potentially mistakenly) that the pronunciation can't have changed THAT much.

She pronounces ai as 'aee' but ai definitely an 'ɛ' sound (as in head: /hɛd/) in modern greek

She then pronounces 'meden' as mɛdɛn when it should be midɛn (η is an ee sound, at least in modern geek)

and she puts a strongish h in holos (ὅλως) which again seems like a person without any greek knowledge reading the latin alphabet version of the word and assuming how it's pronounced...

she says zɛn instead of zeen/zin

So again, as a modern greek with no particular knowledge of how ancient pronunciation worked, this was pretty bad to my ears..

If you know more than me please correct me, it would be great to know

[tuomosipola]

I have studied Latin at the university level and also some Greek, especially from the historical linguistic point of view.

I truly understand that the ancient pronunciation sounds bad to your ears! All those "mistakes" that you mentioned are exactly the ways that Greek pronunciation has changed over the thousands (!) of years. If you look closely, it is as if the writing system is made for the old language, which is the case. The modern pronunciation drifts further apart from what is written. Historical linguistics is quite interesting once you get into it.

I recommend the following books, although both quite technical in the linguistic sense:

Allen, Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek 3rd Edition (Cambridge University Press 1987)

Horrocks, Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, 2nd Edition (Wiley-Blackwell 2010)

[hcayless]

It's a pretty good rendition. Greek pronunciation has shifted a lot from ancient to modern. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iotacism. Among other things, the accentuation has gone from pitch, which comes out nicely in this version (though we don't know precisely what it sounded like), to stress. So while it may look quite familiar to you reading it, it would have sounded very different. There was a Modern Greek speaker in the intro to Ancient Greek class I took in college, and I remember him remarking how disorienting it was.

[adia]

According to Wikipedia, "first century AD is the most probable guess" for the stele's age. By that time, pronunciation was probably nearer to the modern language than to Ancient Greek, although, of course, not exactly the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology#Popular_...

Even Modern Greek, despite the homogenization effect of modern communications, still has local dialects which sound very different from one another and aren't easily intelligible to speakers of the standard dialect.

[hcayless]

The shift in pronunciation wasn’t a simple and straightforward process. If you’re trying to argue that the reconstruction is faulty on the basis that the shift was >50% complete, I’d respond that nothing like that level of precision is possible. Moreover, I’d expect funerary songs to be a bit conservative in their pronunciation.

[wutangson1]

It makes sense why it would sound terrible to your ears. The way 'ancient' Greek is taught in U.S. universities- referred to as Attic Greek- is based on the pronunciation ascribed to Erasmus- the Dutch Scholar. Of course, it is just a theory.