I have some very basic understanding of greek, so I'm not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. But the way that they pronounce (sing) diphthongs is not quite right and I feel that makes the song sound... rougher somehow.
They are also probably trying to reproduce Ancient Greek pronunciation, which treats diphthongs differently. I believe in Ancient Greek the sounds were pronounced closer to how they are spelled, and the collapse into diphthongs happened later (nt -> d, mp -> b, ai -> e, etc.).
There is plenty of evidence, well documented, of how ancient Greek languages, and Attic in particular, sounded. Transliterations of Latin, Egyptian, Persian names, and words taken from other languages, and Latin transliterations of Greek names and words. Non-orthographic spellings and misspellings. Rhymes and the preservation of supersegmental qualities in poetry. Grammarians describing in detail how likely barbarians were to mispronounce certain words and how to best pronounce words. There's more to learn, but it's not unknowable.
To some degree that's true, to some degree it's not.
Given enough of the right samples and their context, you can make strong informed guesses about pronunciation from how words are used in structured samples like poetry/plays that embed rhythm, rhyme, etc in established ways; from patterns in the way words shift over time; etc
There are quite a lot of signals you can feel confident drawing from, but of course you can't get to 100% accuracy even if you had perfect insight or even heard the word spoken because pronunciation does still vary by individual, family, community, context, etc
I don't know what's right here myself or how established the consensus is around what might be right, but the discussion you're responding to isn't frivolous or unreasonable on its face.
Consensus has nothing to do with how one can know what things sounded like 2000 years ago, when we have no means to verify anything.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
My point is a pretty straightforward one. To say you have knowledge of a thing, you need to be able to personally verify whatever-it-is. I can personally verify I'm sitting in a chair. I can never verify that music sounded like that 2000 years ago, cos I was not there. I can read a book that describes the sound, but that still doesn't mean I can verify it!
"We" cannot know a thing - there may be a consensus opinion (the wisdom of crowds and all that) - it might be a good guess - but this is not knowledge. And can never be.
This doesn't take away from the fun endeavour though. If you want to recreate sounds from the descriptions given in text, go ahead - I'll listen to it.
By your standard, most of us also don't "know" that the Civil War happened or that there is a vacuum in space. It's deductions, inductions, personal attestations, and consensuses all the way down. Yet, to navigate a modern world that presents itself as scientific and evidence-based, most of us adopt beliefs about these things -- sometimes with much stubbornness and sometimes very lightly -- and call these things "knowledge" too.
You can be a stickler about your use of the term, but the more you are, the more distanced you find yourself from common usage, the more needlessly contentious and pedantic discussions become, and the more you're left to come up with your own language to describe all the usages you've chosen to reject.
Right - I'm more distanced from common usage, for sure.
On the other hand, my assessments and understanding is my own. My brain is not "outsourced" to consensus or experts. I'm fine with that!
I'm interested to see if you have a suggestion that would draw this distinction out better. The idea that something can be 'known' at large by a group, and the idea that the individual 'knows' because he has personally verified something. Are both these really "knowledge"? Can knowledge be a team sport? Is knowledge what the person with the biggest megaphone, or the most supporters say it is?
I'm also interested to hear a better term than 'know', for those things that the individual has verified vs what you would call (group) "knowledge" - but I personally think my 'hard' definition is the proper one. One knows, or one believes (or theorises/hypothesises/etc). It might (or might not) be fair/useful to hold consensus opinion - but, as far as the individual is concerned this type of information ought to be characterised as 'belief'.
I'm sure you can tell, but I think knowledge (all thinking and emotions actually) occur in the individual only. A generic "we" cannot know anything - knowledge is enlivened in the individual mind only.
I think this is all self-evident, but I'm always happy to hear alternative views, better definitions of terms, etc. I invite you to explain further and correct me!
> Consensus has nothing to do with how one can know what things sounded like 2000 years ago, when we have no means to verify anything.
The consensus might be bang on. Or it might be wildly wrong. Or something else. Who can say?
Neither can a person who has never left the US who realistically would not visit France verify whether they are speaking French as is spoken in Marseilles. Yet the effort to approximate it is not futile, and having practiced with a native French speaker from Marseilles to the point of fluency is usually proof enough for many to say that they know French as is spoken in Marseilles, even though it seems to me that you would not regard this as knowledge.
You can go and hear it, and then it would already be a few weeks in the past that the speech you were wondering about was produced, you would still be processing it through your imperfect ears, etc. The fidelity is neither perfect; it's a matter of degree, though quite extreme. You have chosen merely to draw the threshold for calling it knowledge at one point rather than another
> the way that they pronounce (sing) diphthongs is not quite right
I find it amusing that you say you have a “very basic understanding“ of Greek and then judge whether a team from Oxford who has been studying this for many years is pronouncing it correctly.
