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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4403280, member: 72790&quot;]Interesting question about the pronunciation of Nicomedia or the pronunciation of any ancient language. The most honest answer is we don&#039;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.&nbsp; 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&#039;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&#039;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&#039;s lecture will be on the proper pronunciation of Latin in Classical Times versus that of the Medieval Latin of the Church.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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