Do you sometimes struggle in knowing how to correctly pronounce words, including names? I do. When I was in college, a friend of mine at Biola invited me to spend the Christmas break with him in Portland, Oregon. As we neared his home he asked me to say the word "Willamette" out loud. Out came "Wil-la-MET-ee." Welcome to the "Commonly Butchered Name Club," Dave! After he had stopped chuckling he gave me the correct pronunciation: "Wil-LA-met." Later, when I had moved to Basel in Switzerland, I discovered that there were four official names for that city:
- Basle
- Basel
- Bâl
- Basilea
Yikes!
Well, the other day I was watching some YouTube videos on the subject of text types in New Testament textual criticism in which one of the interviewees consistently referred to a certain Codex "Beza." The manuscript is, of course, Codex Bezae. When you say "Beza," you are referring, not to the manuscript, but to the Swiss scholar who donated the codex to the University of Cambridge. Why, then, was "Beza" (the name of the scholar) changed to "Bezae" (the genitive case in Latin)? "Codex Bezae was called Codex Bezae because it was the property of Theodore Beza" (thank you James Snapp). Yep. It's just that simple.
Here are two New Testament scholars at Cambridge correctly bringing out the -ae suffix in Bezae:
I should probably mention here that there are some significant differences between Classical Latin and Ecclesiastical Latin (not to mention Pig Latin). In classical Latin, the diphthong -ae is pronounced as the igh in the English word fight. In Ecclesiastical Latin, the exact same diphthong is pronounced as the a in the English word mate. No need to stress out over this. Personally, I use the Ecclesiastical pronunciation for -ae (as does this scholar), but if you want to use the Classical pronunciation that's fine.
I know all this probably comes across as pretty pedantic. But scholars of the New Testament, especially textual critics, pride themselves on paying attention to details!
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P.S. Just for fun, can you correctly pronounce the following names? (Scroll down for the answers.) If you can get all 7 correct, you deserve the Pulitzer Prize!
- Ayn Rand
- Gresham Machen
- Karl Barth
- Joaquin Phoenix
- Likelike Highway (Oahu)
- Ralph Fiennes
- Jake Gyllenhaal
- Eye-n Rand
- Gres-um May-chen
- Karl Bart
- Wa-keen Fee-nix
- Lee-kay-lee-kay Highway
- Rafe fines
- Jayk Jil-lin-hall