What is the correct Greek pronunciation of Thalia?
Friday, September 11th, 2009 at
10:54 am
I have seen and heard several different pronunciations, but I want to know how it is pronounced in Greece. Thalia is the name of the Greek Muse of Comedy.
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Tagged with: greece • greek muse of comedy • muse • muse of comedy • pronunciations • thalia
Filed under: Greek - Written and Spoken
They-lee-uh is the most common.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/thalia
it’s pronounced tah-lee-ya
See following:
http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=thalia&submit=Submit
My pseudonym!!
The pronunciation in Greek is roughly t’haa-lee-a with the emphasis on the first syllable.
Both the t and h are pronounced. There is no English "th" sound in Greek. Although in English you usually pronounce it that way.
First off — believe it or not — the "interdental fricatives" [θ] & [ð] /th/ are two of the hardest sounds for any human to make because it involves sticking our tongue out inbetween our top & bottom front teeth. That’s hard for most English-speakers to understand because we use that sound in almost every other syllable.
Most of the world’s languages lack this sound, so when other language speakers learn English, they usually replace /th/ with a sound from their register which they think approxmiates our phoneme(s). For example, the French normally say [z] for [θ]. It’s also why people in Spain say [θ] for /ci/ but elsewhere in Latin America, they use [s] for /ci/ (except for Argentina). Even some dialects of English traditionally omit this consonant: in Ireland, they asperate [θ] as [t] (like in the word /tic-tock/) and African-American Language speakers substitute [d] for [ð]. When two sounds can be changed in one language and the switch doesn’t effect the words meaning and native speakers understand both sounds as forming the same word, it’s call an "allophone."
How does this relate to Ancient Greek?
Ancient Greek, like English, was a unviersal language at one time, and just like our pronouncations varies from country to country & region to region, Greek did, too. Some later dialects pronounced /Thalia/ with a [θ], but most asperated it (again like in /tic-tock/).
Most scholars agree that the Creatan dialect, which standardized the first Greek alphabet, did not have [θ] but asperated it.[1] The Laconian dialect (i.e. Sparta) probably had an interdental fricative as early as the 5th Century BCE, but speakers of that dialect living in Athens (like the playwrite Aristophanes) probably approximated the asperated [t] represented by "theta" as "eth" [ð] (like our word /20th/) as allophones [ibid.] We know that by the 1st Century CE /th/ was pronounced more in the spoken dialects because of graffiti found at Pompeii. [ibid.]
Therefore, the more standard way to say it in Classical Ancient Greek is asperated [t] as in . . . but [θ] is also correct because by the first century CE it was already part of the Attic dialect (i.e. Athens) which later became Modern Greek.
In IPA /thalia/ = [tʰalia] or [θalia] depending on which pronouncation you intend to use.
Thank you johnnydiva! What a excellent and scholarly post! I am often asked by many Americans why a pronounce Thalia as [tʰalia]. I explain it is the classical Greek pronunication which I am most familiar with. They often have a hard time with my preferred classical Greek pronunciation of Melissa [mé-lisa] as well!