Customer Reviews

Basics of Biblical Greek Vocabulary

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While not as comprehensive as Pennington's New Testament Greek Vocabulary, Mounce has a mastery and confidence wholly lacking in Pennington. Still the caveat remains; Zondervan pronunciation borders on inept and neglects to follow its own set rules. Omicron should be pronounced as in obey; consonantal iota should be pronounced as in onion. Other than that this cd serves its purpose. I would suggest Metzger's Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek over Mounce. Just buy a pack of index cards for a dollar and save the trouble.

I recomand this cd to any one who wants to learn biblical greek. If you learn all the words from this cd and with a litlle grammar you can manage through New Testament.
This cd is helpfull if you have also the book - Basic of Biblical Greek.
I recomand you use BibleWorks as a biblical software for reading greek new testament.

Really like how Mounce gives us an verbal examples of these Greek words, after all it's like learning a whole new language (yea cause that is what it is)
If you are going to learn Greek this is a product worth it's weight in gold

As a vocabulary list this is good, but since one has to listen to it, the pronunciation is very bad, and I have to battle to try and understand what he was actually saying when I realised that he was pronouncing many letters incorrectly according to modern or Byzantine Greek. In the CD of his book "Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar", Mounce confesses that the pronounciation is probably incorrect, but if he taught it any other way his students would not understand students from other seminaries. So the errors will be perpetuated.
For example D is pronounced Thelta, not Delta in modern Greek, U is properly pronounced "ipsilon" and not "oopsilon". The "U" is an "ee" sound, not an "oo" sound. In biblical Greek, he pronounces "Kurios" which is Lord, incorrectly as "koorios" instead of "Kirios".
"Eime", I am, he pronounces "aimee". It should be "eeme".
He calls brother "adelfos" which should be "athelfos".

I cannot blame the author as it seems that all teachers are using "Erasmian" Ancient Greek. That is ancient Greek pronounciation as estimated by a guy who never spoke Greek. I did some research on the web and discovered that when Ancient Green was first "discovered" by the western Europeans, a guy called Erasmus decided that there should be one standard of pronounciation (which had nothing to do with Greek), which he of course created in his own image. This is the pronounciation now used across the world when teaching ancient Greek, but it is very contentious amongst Greek scholars (understandably, since it sounds western but not Greek. Latin may have befallen the same fate.

Of course nobody really knows how it should be pronounced, but it is more likely closer to Byzantine Greek than to American or English. Erasmus apparently also changed his mind later on in his life.