By producing these two closely related works on New Testament Greek phonology, K. and publisher William B. Eerdmans have done a huge service to a large audience, namely scholars with an interest in the history of the Greek language and all people with an interest in the Greek of the New Testament. The longer work, nearly 900 pages in length (henceforth PNTG) and its far shorter companion volume (henceforth Guide) together, as K. puts it in the preface to the first of these, are intended to provide a solid scholarly basis for answers to questions that students of New Testament Greek inevitably pose and confront; in K.’s words (PNTG, p. xliii):

Animated in this way by a legitimate pedagogical question, K. approaches the topic from a scientific perspective and exhaustively presents all relevant information pertaining to the pronunciation of Greek in the New Testament era. However, despite the title of each book, the focus is not just on New Testament Greek, but, rather, as the subtitle of PNTG indicates, the aim of the book is to address a far broader time span, covering the period from the era of Alexander the Great, fl. 330 bce, to the emergence of Islam in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the seventh century ce. Not only, therefore, is the time period extensive, but so too are the sources of relevant information.

Moreover, the demands of pedagogy are relevant in another way. PNTG is an imposing work, not just from its length but also in the level of detail provided, so that for those uninitiated in phonology and historical linguistics using it might take some getting used to. Thus, by providing the Guide as a companion to PNTG, K. gives readers an overview of the most important aspects. Interested parties can then turn to PNTG for the details.

In addition to K.’s overt foreshadowing of the contents in his preface and the sheer length of PNTG, there are two prefatory documents setting out the contents of the book. One of these is a single page, labelled ‘Summary of contents’ with just the titles of the ten chapters. That might suffice for a short presentation, but something more substantial is needed in a tome as voluminous as PNTG: K. also gives a 39-page exposé of the contents. This piece, labelled ‘Contents’, provides the details for each of the book’s ten chapters. By contrast, the Guide offers a compromise, with a ‘Contents’ item that is a mere three pages, with more detail than PNTG’s ‘Summary of contents’ but far less than PNTG’s ‘Contents’ document. A welcome touch in the Guide’s ‘Contents’ is the cross-referencing offered in its Chapter 4 – the heart of the presentation – to relevant parallel sections in PNTG.

In ten chapters PNTG presents as detailed a picture as one could hope for of how Greek was pronounced during the extended Koine period. K. offers meticulous coverage of all available sources of information on the pronunciation of Greek in the targeted time period. These sources cover inscriptions of various types, including imperial, public, magical, religious, funerary and domestic, some of which are ostraca, where the material written on is a potsherd; documentary texts, such as contracts and letters, generally written on papyrus; and biblical manuscripts as well as works by assorted Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors whose literacy in Greek was not necessarily of the highest level, so that revealing misspellings occur on occasion. The scope of the sources is impressive, and K. is appropriately careful as to their use, reminding readers that the definition of ‘literacy’ in ancient times is not the same as today, and cautioning users to keep in mind that many inscriptions were written by professional artisans. In this way K. builds a compelling picture of the sociology of writing in ancient Judeo-Palestine and thus of the concomitant sociolinguistic dimension to dealing with ancient written materials. He is careful too to point out that, as interesting as misspellings are, sometimes they are simply nothing more than scribal errors and are not revealing as to the phonetics associated with the written forms.

The book starts with some introductory chapters on relevant scholarship, on sources and on the social, historical and linguistic setting of Judeo-Palestine in the selected chronological period. Interestingly too, in recognition of the likelihood that many users of this work will not be linguists and so might be more interested in the New Testament per se than in the details of the phonological history of Greek, there is a brief but helpful chapter on ‘How to Read (the Phonology Section of) This Book’ (Chapter 5).

The real meat of PNTG is contained in four substantial chapters, 6–9. First, the short Chapter 6 locates the ‘Judeo-Palestinian Koine in time and space’ by fitting it into the long diachrony of Greek from classical Attic, which he takes as the main input into the Koine, to Modern Greek. K. proceeds with two highly detailed chapters on Koine phonology: Chapter 7, dealing with consonants, and Chapter 8, on vowels and diphthongs. There is also a section (pp. 759–64) on accent and stress, which is understandably brief, given that we cannot hear Koine Greek and thus cannot really know the acoustic nature of Koine prosody. K. wisely takes advantage of the documentation available for Greek and organises the presentation in these chapters in terms of the letters and letter combinations of the Greek alphabet.

Chapter 9 offers a variationist perspective on Koine pronunciation, very briefly providing some insight into regional and sociolinguistic variation in the Koine. Finally, the exposition ends with a brief two-page conclusion in Chapter 10.

There is less to say specifically about the Guide, inasmuch as it is derived from PNTG, but it is definitely a useful complement to the longer book and serves its intended audience well. In some ways it can be a sort of refuge from PNTG for the non-linguist in that it cogently summarises the key findings presented in such exquisite detail in PNTG.

It is hard to take issue with anything K. provides, but I have a few very minor criticisms. I would perhaps question the focus on ‘Great Attic’ in Chapter 6 as the primary input into the Koine variety of Greek, when the Koine and beyond often reflect Ionic usage and not Attic per se. For instance, in the variation between Ionic -σσ- and Attic -ττ-, it is the Ionic variant that prevails in Modern Greek, not the Attic form, as seen in, for example, modern γλώσσα, ‘language; tongue’. Also, while K. refers on p. xliii to the ‘Erasmian’ pronunciation of classical Greek as an oft-used surrogate for the pronunciation of Biblical Greek and rightly points out that there are problems with simply applying classical phonetic values to Koine letters, he might mention that there are country-specific traditions regarding the pronunciation of the classical language; for instance, in at least some parts of the German-speaking world, the combination <ϵυ>is not pronounced as the diphthong [ew] but rather as [oj]. Finally, while K. cautions readers on p. xliv that in the term ‘Judeo-Palestinian’, the Judeo- part ‘is regional (i.e., province Iudaea) and not religious (Jewish)’, he might have used ‘Judaea-Palestinian’ throughout to drive that point home. That may have gone against conventional usage, but with a soon-to-be-a-classic work such as PNTG K. was in a position to be an agent of change in regard to nomenclature (I noticed occasional instances of ‘Judea-Palestinian’ in the work, which I assume were simply typos).

In short, while the facts reported in PNTG are reasonably well known, it is particularly useful to have all this information compiled in one place, and all the more so especially with a helper alongside in Short Guide. This massive and in some ways groundbreaking work, together with its companion, is certain to be the standard citation for years to come regarding the phonology of Greek in this period.