Thread by @PhDniX

When I talk about reading traditions, I usually talk about the reading traditions of the Quran or, recently, the reading tradition of the Arabic translation of the Hebrew bible. But today I want to talk about the sociolinguistics of the Dutch reading tradition of Classical Greek!

European countries tend to develop specific traditional pronunciations of classical languages (primarily Latin & Greek), and there is some amount of diversity on how this is done. Dutch is no different in this regard and has a pretty distinct manner of reading Classical Greek.

The Greek diphthong ευ [eu], for example is pronounced in Dutch not as [ø], like the French do it, but instead identical to the Dutch diphthong <ui>, once a long version of the rounded front high vowel <u> [y], but which has since become a diphthong with great regional variation.

Conventionally this diphthong is transcribed as [œy], but there is significant variation. My pronunciation is probably closer to [ɐy], whereas my girlfriend lands at [œi]. There are also monophthongal realizations. All of this is not so important what's import is ευ = <ui> /œy/.

This conventional pronunciation is rather unusual. If we transcribe Greek into Latin script ευ, we write it as eu (eucharistie, eucalyptus etc.), but the natural pronunciation of <eu> is [ø] as it is in French, e.g. neus [nøs] 'nose', so why do we pronounce it [œy]?

This seems to stem from a development in German, rather than Dutch. In German the diphthong <eu> (and <äu>) was originally [ɛu], but at some point flipt to [ɔi], as in deutsch [dɔitʃ]. The German reading tradition of Greek started of with a good approximation of the Greek:

The Greek diphthong ευ [eu] was borrowed as the German diphthong <eu> [ɛu], which however subsequently shifted to [ɔi], along with all the normal German words that originally contained <eu> [ɛu].

It seems that at this stage Dutch borrowed the German reading tradition of Greek.

As Dutch had no diphthong [ɔi], it mapped the closest match onto it, namely, [œy]. This is at least what I believe happened, but anyone who has made a study of the history of the Dutch reading tradition of Greek, please jump in and correct me!

All this intro was actually to get into something more interesting: the way the Greek ευ is used in loanwords that appear in standard Dutch. Like other ευropean languages, Dutch has a lot of religious and scientific terminology borrowed from Greek.

Prescriptively, if a Greek loanword contained <eu>, you are supposed to pronounce it [œy], and not [ø], the way non-Greek words containing <eu> would be pronounced.
Thus: <peuter> "toddler" ['pøtəʁ], but <therapeut> [teʁa'pœyt]... But the orthographic mismatch causes conflict.

So I often find that I have [œy] where my girlfriend will have [ø]. Thus:
<therapeut> me: [teʁa'pœyt] gf: [teʁa'pøt]
<euthanasie> me: [œytana'zi] gf: [øtana'zi]
<eufemisme> me: [œyfe'mɪsmə] gf: [øfe'mɪsmə]
<pseudoniem> me: [psœydo'nim] gf [psødo'nim]

This seems to be in part a regional thing, it is also clearly a social class thing. I'm from an upper middle class background and I learned these pronunciation in the Classical pronunciation, whereas my girlfriend has the more obvious pronunciation.

This isn't a perfect split though. There are quite a few common words which I too pronounce with [ø], <Europa> , <eucalyptus>, <leukemie> and, surprisingly, <Eureka!> (Greek for "I found it!").

Likewise my girlfriend has [œy] for several typical words, like <Zeus> and <Perseus>.

This double pronunciation leads to discussion on Reddit that expose the sociolinguistic implications clearly: ""eu" is Greek for "good" and is pronounced as "ui" if you want to do it properly/decently, and want to show you're not of the streets."
reddit.com/r/thenetherlan…

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