I'd like to learn ancient (koine) Greek and/or modern Greek and I want to tackle pronunciation at the beginning. I know ancient Greek has it's pronunciation issues being a dead language. I've purchased Gabe Wyner's Fluent Forever pronunciation trainers for several languages but he doesn't offer a pronunciation trainer even for modern Greek. So I'm trying to figure out how to go about creating / obtaining a list of minimal pairs so I can make an Anki deck myself.
Does anyone know where I can obtain a list of (modern) Greek minimal pairs? Does anyone know of any resources for minimal pairs in various languages? Does anyone know the process of how Gabe created his pronunciation trainers (where did he get the minimal pairs for all these languages)? I'm sure some linguists in academia have put together lists of minimal pairs for various languages but don't know how I'd obtain them.
I'm no linguist, just an amateur language learner. If I can't find any minimal pairs list, here's my thought process on how I'd go about doing this myself. First, I'd search Wikipedia for the pronunciation of that language (something like Ancient Greek Phonology) and get a list of all the phonemes / IPA. Then I'd pay a native speaker of target language to sit down (iTalki via Skype) and try to come up with a list of words that encompasses all the phonemes of that language. I can get obviously record the audio of each word. The tricky part would be coming up with two words that are similar in every respect except for one phoneme - and that phoneme difference must be very slight (this is what we're training to discern, after all). The native speaker would presumably have to have a large vocabulary to produce some potentially low-frequency words that would exactly complement the phoneme you're trying to isolate. I think solving that problem is at the crux of this whole activity. Do I just stick with real-word minimal pairs (e.g., ship-sheep) and/or should I include non-word minimal pairs (e.g., stin-steen)? I'd imagine that a perfect process for this would be to be able to filter a database of words for words with specific phonemes, number of syllables, and also which phonemes/syllables come before and after the target phoneme. I don't know if there's any material or literature out there that has something like this process documented with more information but if anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be much obliged.
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(extra thoughts)
As an aside, I'm debating whether to study Attic Greek or Koine Greek - I hear Attic is more encompassing and Koine is a watered-down version of Attic - so if you can understand Attic it's easier to move to Koine than vice versa. A second issue I'd have - with either version - is what pronunciation do I choose? I did research on this maybe a year ago, so I don't remember the details, but the gist is your alternatives are to use the 'reconstructed' pronunciation or you can just pronounce it as a modern Greek speaker would pronounce it (e.g., I think modern Greeks pronounce the letter beta as a [v] but it was originally [b]). I'm flexible as to either of these two options. I do want to be able to speak the language and not just be able to read and write, so I'm aiming to practice with ancient Greek tutors on iTalki who are also native (modern) Greek speakers. So basically if they're all pronouncing ancient Greek one way or another that would be the deciding factor in how I choose my pronunciation and thus it would direct which minimal pairs I choose to create to practice that pronunciation.
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