Pronunciation of Greek Proper Names

It is hard to give rules which will ensure that you pronounce all Greek proper names 'correctly', and in fact there are differences even amongst educated English speakers in the way some of these names are pronounced. Incidentally, the 'correct' (RP) English pronunciation of these names does not accurately reflect the way they were pronounced by the ancient Greeks themselves. For one thing, Classical Greek had a pitch accent, not (as English does) a stress accent, i.e., the ancient Greeks marked the accent on a syllable not by stressing it but by raising their voice. And, quite apart from this, many of the details of the pronunciation of Classical Greek are uncertain.

The following rules will help you to pronounce Greek proper names in the way they are pronounced by educated English speakers.

• A final '-es' or '-e' is a separate syllable. So Aristophanes has five syllables, Demosthenes and Antigone have four syllables, and Sophocles and Xanthippe have three syllables. The final '-es' is pronounced '-eeze' as in the English word 'sneeze', and the final '-e' (which is a common ending for the names of females) is pronounced as a short 'i' like the 'y' in the English word 'comedy'.

• Some letters are not always pronounced as they normally are in English:
  • y is usually pronounced as a short 'i', except when it occurs in a stressed syllable, when it is pronounced like the English word 'eye'.
  • g is hard (IPA: /g/), as in English 'get', 'go' and 'gull', except when it comes before 'e', 'i', or 'y': it is then often soft /dʒ/, i.e., as in the English word 'gesture'.
  • th is as in 'theme', not as in 'the' - it is unvoiced. . (The Greek letter θ, 'theta', representing this sound is still used in the IPA for the same purpose. The voiced partner, as in 'the', is represented by the Old English letter ð.)
  • ch is pronounced as in the Scottish word 'loch' or as 'k'. (The Greek letter χ, 'chi', representing this sound is still used in the IPA to represent the first of these.)
  • c is pronounced as 'k', except when it comes before 'e', 'i', or 'y': it is then often pronounced 's'.
  • ae is pronounced as 'ee'.
  • eu is pronounced as 'you', i.e., as 'eu' in 'Europe'.

• The rules for the accent are the same as the rules for the stress accent in Classical Latin. If a name has two syllables, the accent is on the first syllable (as in 'Cyrus', 'Timon', 'Laches', 'Zeno'). If a name has more than two syllables, the accent is on the second syllable from the end if the syllable is long (as in 'Aphrodite', 'Dionysus'); if the syllable is short, the accent is on the third syllable from the end (as in 'Demosthenes', 'Socrates', 'Herodotus'). Since the second last syllable in many of the commonest endings - e.g., '-ides', '-ines', '-anes', '-icles', '-acles', '-ates' - is short, this means that many Greek names have their accent on the third syllable from the end.