'A LIVING SPEECH'? THE PRONUNCIATION OF GREEK IN EARLY MEDIEVAL IRELAND

Abstract

While the Irish knowledge of Greek in the early Middle Ages has been much debated, the evidence of Irish language texts has been largely ignored. Early Irish glossaries (O'Mulconry's Glossary, Sanas Cormaic, Duil Dromma Cetta) cite at least 190 Greek words, and this presents an opportunity to study some sources for Greek available in Ireland. This article looks at the evidence of the glossaries for the pronunciation of Greek in particular. In doing so, it aims to clarify the extent to which Greek in Ireland was, in Zimmer's words, 'a living speech'.1 1. Greek in early medieval Ireland The knowledge of Greek among the early medieval Irish, both at home and abroad, has been the subject of a long and often lively debate since Ludwig Traube published his seminal study 'O Roma nobilis' in 1891.2 Traube boldly asserted that 'anyone on the Continent who knew Greek during the time of Charles the Bald was either an Irishman or without question had acquired this knowledge from an Irishman, or else the report which surrounded the person with such renown was a fraud'.3 Bernhard Bischoff' s study also placed particular emphasis on the activities of Irish peregrini ,4 * Research for this article was funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). I wish to thank the editors of Eriu for their corrections and suggestions, and Jacopo Bisagni, Graham Isaac, Amanda Kelly, PierreYves Lambert, Daibhi O Croinin and Paul Russell for helpful discussions. Any remaining faults are my own. 1 See note 22 below. 2 Ludwig Traube, 'О Roma nobilis. Philologische Untersuchungen aus dem Mittelalter , Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 19/2 (1891), 299-395. See the broad survey by Walter Berschin, Griechisch-lateinisches Mittelalter: von Hieronymus zu Nikolaus von Kues (Berne and Munich, 1980), translated by Jerold С. Frakes, Greek letters and the Latin Middle Ages: from Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa (Washington, DC, 1988). Berschin summarised the Irish evidence in 'Griechisches bei den Iren', in Heinz Lowe (ed.), Die Iren und Europa in fruheren Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1982), 501-10, and gave a synopsis for the earlier period in 'Greek elements in medieval Latin manuscripts', in M.W. Herren (ed.), The sacred nectar of the Greeks: the study of Greek in the West in the early Middle Ages, King's College London medieval studies 2 (London, 1988), 85-104. 3 Cited in translation in Berschin, Greek letters , 132. 4 Bernhard Bischoff, 'Das griechische Element in der abendlandischen Bildung des Mittelalters', Byzantinische Zeitschrift 44 (1951), 27-55, repr. in Mittelalterliche Studien 2 (Stuttgart, 1967), 246-75. DOI: 10.3318/ERIU.2011.61.29 Eriu Lxi (2011) 29-57 © Royal Irish Academy This content downloaded from 207.46.13.128 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 05:34:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms