Episodes
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Text for Episode 71-Κάτο στον Άγιο Σίδερω
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Lydía Zervanos has graciously sent me pdfs of the texts (with IPA!) for Episode 71 to post here at the blog page. Here is Κάτο στον Άγιο Σίδερω. Thank you so much, Lydía, and happy listening and studying to everyone!
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Text for Episode 71-Ο Ναός
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Tuesday Sep 24, 2013
Lydía Zervanos has graciously sent me pdfs of the texts (with IPA!) for Episode 71 to post here at the blog page. Here is Ο Ναός. Thank you so much, Lydía, and happy listening and studying to everyone!
Sunday Sep 01, 2013
Episode 71
Sunday Sep 01, 2013
Sunday Sep 01, 2013
In the second episode of our two-part discussion of Modern Greek Diction, Lydía Zervános works through the texts Κάτω στον Άγιο Σίδερο and Ο Ναός. We focus on the letters Gamma γ and Kappa κ and the vowel digraphs: αι [ε]; ει, οι and υι which all become [i]; αυ [av] or [af] and ευ [εv] or [εf]; and ου [u], along with the accent marking ´ and the diaeresis ¨ .
Κάτω στον Άγιο Σίδερο is probably recognized better as "La-bas, vers l'église", from Ravel's Five Greek Songs. Ο Ναός was composed by Μανώλης Καλομοίρης (the founder of the Greek National School of Music) to a text by Κωστής Παλαμάς (a Greek poet in the late 1880s who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn).
The other resources that I mentioned in the episode were:
- Learning Greek Podcasts by the Hellenic American Union--a podcast where you can practice listening and learn quite a few useful colloquial phrases in Modern Greek
- Επικοινωνήστε ελληνικά--all in Modern Greek, this is a great book to learn the language from, since you don't have to keep flipping between the Greek alphabet and the Latin one as you're learning; there are 3 main books and 2 workbooks to go along with each of them
- Minos--try this on Spotify! Type in Minos in the Spotify search and under the albums you should get a few listings for Greek Pop music. It's a great way to hear the sounds of the language!
As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or suggestions here, at the Facebook page, on Twitter or directly at ellen@ellenrissinger
Monday Jun 03, 2013
Episode 70
Monday Jun 03, 2013
Monday Jun 03, 2013
Είμαι πάρα πολύ χαρουμένη για αυτά τα επισόδια! This episode and the next will be on one of my favorite topics--Modern Greek Diction! On this episode, baritone Aris Argiris works through the Greek alphabet with us, through the text Κόρες της Αττικής. Κόρες της Αττικής was set to music by Theodoros Karyotakis (I could only find this in German on Wikipedia), a student of Dmitri Mitropoulos. The text to this song can be found on page 49 of Lydia Zervanos' Greek Diction Guide for Singers, from a Presidential Scholars Project she put together several years ago. She has since tweaked some of the transcriptions for errors, but the rules to Greek diction in the first half of the project are invaluable. As I promised, here is the Greek alphabet, along with an Americanized form of their names plus the options for their pronunciation (not including the digraphs that we'll talk about on the next episode):
- Α α - alpha [a]
- Β β - vita [v]
- Γ γ - gamma [γ] [ʝ]
- Δ δ - delta [ð]
- Ε ε - epsilon [ε]
- Ζ ζ - zita [z]
- Η η - ita [i]
- Θ θ - thita [θ]
- Ι ι - iota [i] [j] [ç]
- Κ κ - kappa [k] [c]
- Λ λ - lambda [l] [λ]
- Μ μ - mi [m]
- Ν ν - ni [n]
- Ξ ξ - ksi [ks]
- Ο ο - omikron [ɔ]
- Π π - pi [p]
- Ρ ρ - rho [r]
- Σ σ ς - sigma [s] [z]
- Τ τ - tau [t]
- Υ υ - ipsilon [i] [v] [f]
- Φ φ - fi [f]
- Χ χ - xi [x] [ç]
- Ψ ψ - psi [ps]
- Ω ω - omega [ɔ]