Lynnet wrote:Is there an online guide to Greek names (mythological)?
Lynne
Yes, most dictionaries will have these, so one could look at an online dictionary as someone just said.
It's probably worth buying a copy of the paperback Penguin
Who's Who in the Ancient World which is cheap enough and which indicates the pronunciations in the index, using a macron (line over a vowel) to indicate if it's long and a breve (half-circle over a vowel) if it's short and so on.
The Anglicizations are often fairly obvious. (If the names occur in the context of, say, French or Italian opera the pronunciations, sometimes spelling, will be different.)
So traditionally you use ordinary English vowels: the i in "pin" for short I, the i in "might" for long; the e in "met" for short E, the e in "evil" for long e; the a in "mat' for short A, the a in "save" for long a, and so on ...
You do hear people attempt "latinate" vowels in some of these names -- particularly if they don't recognize the name. But it is rather affected: these names have been around in European languages and have assumed local dress over the years.
So (using the @ sign for a neutral vowel -- shwa sound):
Iphegenia: EYE-ph@-gin-EYE-@
Orpheus: OAR-fee-@s
Euridice: you-RID-i-see
Anteus: An-TEE-@s
Chaos: KAY-oss
I believe the long and short vowels mostly follow the Greek quantities, though not the Greek sounds. But this is not always so. Thus the traditional English pronunciation of Eros is EAR-oss although I understand that is "false quantity".
Note that Ch is always going to be K -- so Chaos is KAY-oss
Also, it tends to be usual to sound all the vowels. For example, Athene is @-THEEN-ee not @-theen.
Interestingly, I bought George Macdonald's
The Princess and the Goblin off iTunes as an Audible download and noticed that the reader pronounced the princess's name (Irene) as EYE-reen. I assume the reader had missed the name was coming from the Greek, making it out to be like Eileen or something. In fact, he should have said EYE-reen-ee ... and I guess Macdonald intends adult readers to recognize this a Greek name, check the meaning if they don't know it, and reflect on it. The name, in fact, is derived from the Greek word for Peace. It seems to me significant that the Old Princess is quite specific that it is
her name -- "I let you have it." Anyway, I digress ...
I tend not to mind about pronunciations on Librivox recordings, whatever a reader says. After all, this is people giving their time free. However, I do tend to feel that something from Audible ought to be correct in all respects. Often it's not. If an actor's being paid to do that as a job, one feels he should take the time and trouble to get things right. I've had Audible downloads with chunks missing out of the middle and chapters in the wrong order. They seem sometimes to put stuff out there without checking it all.