How to pronounce "Nicomedia"?

if it starts with an O' = Irish accent.....

 

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I don't know how accurate this is. If it is, then I have always accented it incorrectly. But then, who knows?
https://www.howtopronounce.com/elagabalus

 

To get an idea of how it might have been pronounced in antiquity, see this inscription:


Severus Alexander, AD 222-235.
Roman provincial Æ 20.4 mm, 4.59 g.
Bithynia, Nicomedia.
Obv: Μ ΑVΡ CΕV ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟC ΑV, laureate and draped bust, r., seen from behind.
Rev: ΝΙΚΟΜΗΔΕΩΝ ΔΙC ΝΕΩΚ, aquila between two military standards.
Refs: RPC VI, 3442; SNG Copenhagen 577 var. (radiate bust); Recueil général 329.

It would have been something like NIK-o-may-DEH-a.

 

Oh, I've looked up the pronunciation in the past, but I just can't look at the name and pronounce it correctly. I guess my brain is not wired that way.

 

Don't get bent out of shape over it. Were you watching the NFL Draft tonight? I had to cringe in disgust how, not one, but all of the announcers (who earn 6+ figures a year?) botched Tua Tagovailoa's last name over and over and over again. Even Roger Gooddell, the NFL Commissioner who earns in the 7-figure range, screwed it up every time. Didn't these guys watch any of the 'Bama football games when he was playing? I guess they were too busy counting their money. ~ Chris

 

Forget ancient pronunciation, how am I supposed to say antoninianus, a word created by numismatists that sounds more like a car crash happening inside my mouth.

 

or something blowing out the last four letters of the word.

 

I don't know how to do it, but isn't this the time for someone to post a vid of Pontius Pilatus' speech problems in Monty Pythons 'Life of Brian'?




Shows the Romans didn't always get it right either...

 

Nope.
You shouldn't hear the final S
The R is very strong. It's the kind of sound english speakers have hard time to pronounce as there is no strong R like that in your language (as far as I know)
The I is short

In the end it doesn't sound like Paaweess, Texas, but PaRi, FRance

As for Nicomedia, well, here we say Nicomedia

Q

 

To be sure, there has been substantial scientific research for how Latin and Greek must have sounded. I believe the main standard works were written in the 1960s by British linguist William Sidney Allen: Vox Latina and Vox Graeca (Cambridge University Press). You might find them in the second hand book world (I'm using Vialibri) for about 20 or 30 dollars.

There are several ways to find out how these languages sounded, even if there are no audio recordings. Here I paraphrase some convincing arguments from an article by a Latin teacher, Casper Porton, on the subject.

- In ancient times, grammarians have written about the pronunciation. So we can read firsthand where certain sounds were spoken in the mouth;
- Romans were fond of word jokes and sound effects and imitating natural sounds;
- The development of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.)
- The ways in which the Romans rendered their words in letters (spelling conventions) including spelling mistakes (they are very significant);
- The way Latin words are pronounced in other languages;
- The internal structure of Latin itself, including the different metric patterns.
- It is also important to realize that there were variations in pronunciation, just as today in our own language. This fact was (and is) used in theatre to depict someone as a funny foreigner or a backward yokel. The way Latin or Greek was put to use by the many theatre authors of Antiquity to show these effects, point to the pronunciation, too.

 

Hello guys, and how do you pronounce" Imperator Titus Flavius Caesar Domitianus Augustus Germanicus" ?
Minerva

 

Very good summary of how this is done. I am very much aware of these methods. While not a linguist, I have taught French, have a masters degree in the Greek New Testament, and have studied and read about pronunciation and how we think things were pronounced. But in the end, it is still something of a "best guess." For instance, we can learn much by seeing how words were pronounced in other languages, say, a Latin name spelled in a Greek text. But that begs the question of how it was pronounced in Greek (or Hebrew, or Coptic, or Hittite, or whatever). And compare that to Paris. If 2000 years hence linguists are trying to understand how Paris was pronounced in French and they compare it to English, they will get it completely wrong. For that matter, the name Paris is, as you know, from Homer, so who is to say the French get it right? Paris, Texas, might be closer. And spelling variations and mistakes give us a lot of information, but they may give us information also of how the word was mispronounced by contemporaries. Puns and other plays on words are very helpful, but again, their usefulness depends on our understanding of the pronunciation of the words being played on.

My point is, let's be aware of how much even "experts" don't really know and be tolerant of one another's pronunciation.

 

Interesting question about the pronunciation of Nicomedia or the pronunciation of any ancient language. The most honest answer is we don't know for sure. Having studied both Attic Greek, the Greek of the Athenian playwrights and the Koine (common) Greek of the New Testament (I was blessed with a classical curriculum at the university) I can tell you that our professors battled endlessly over what the correct pronunciation of both ancient Greek and Latin was supposed to have been. All we had to remember was which one was the one used by which professor in what class. In the case of Nikomedia, that city was not called that until the early Third Century BC, by which time the Attic Greek of the Playwrights was uncommonly spoken except by the well educated, or maybe, still the upper class inhabitants of the vicinity of Athens. The Koine was probably in use in what is modern Turkey by that time. Modern Greek is not much help in what it sounded like some two thousand years earlier. Boy, I found that out fast when I visited Greece some years ago and tried my Koine as a tourist. I might as well have been speaking Latin to modern Italians. They knew what I was doing but either grimaced or laughed at what came out. I guess it must have sounded as Chaucer would to us. Anyway looking at the spelling of Nikomedia in Greek, and with the obligatory diacritical marks there, I would say something like NICK AH MAY DYE AH with the accent on the antepenult , MAY. You may have encountered a few snickers in 200 BC but they would have known what you were talking about. By the way, I don't know if a modern Turkish speaker would be much help in the discussion as the modern name for the city is Izmit and where there does seem to be an attempt to render an early Greek name into Turkish (these two languages are vastly dissimilar) it seems quite a bit different. For example, the great basilica of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (itself a rendering of Constantinopolis) comes out as something like ahja Sophia, or that's what it sounded like to me when I was there. I also discovered that trying any kind of Greek in Istanbul did not go over very well with anybody. Readers here are advised that next week's lecture will be on the proper pronunciation of Latin in Classical Times versus that of the Medieval Latin of the Church.

 

Eucharisto poli.

 

Antipenult, eh.

 

I was wondering about that. Although in Greek the accent is on the MAY (in the nominative, anyway) the following diphthong "ei" is long and normally the accent would be placed on that diphthong but I notice here on your coin replaces the ei with an epsilon (short e) and apparently is in the Genitive plural, omega nu, which may throw off the accent.

 

A day is never a waste if one can learn something new. This is a new one on me. Where I have been all these years (under a rock I presume).

 

OK, you asked for it. Another lesson. First the term is antEpenult, not antIpenult, meaning BEFORE the penult, not, against the penult. Secondly in some languages the accent can fall on the last, ULTIMATE, syllable (rare in Latin, more common in Greek). More often it is on the syllable just before the ultimate (Latin, paene, almost), the penultimate (almost the last syllable) and if falls on the third syllable from the end of the word it is the antepenult, literally the one before the almost last (syllable). In English we have the word penultimate meaning something in a list that is the next to the last one. Also, in English , the accent rarely falls on a syllable that is the fourth one from the end and we often have trouble pronouncing such words. e.g., irrevocable. I trust I have made myself perfectly obscure.

 

Rest assured, you have. I looked up the meaning of antepenult using my external brain when I first saw it in this thread. It's not a word I will use often (if ever). I recall reviewing a report by a subordinate where he used a similar word not used often in spoken English. I changed it to a word more commonly used; however, I learned from his report as I have just learned in this thread. It's a good day!