greek pronunciation

8/3/2019 Greek Pronunciation

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Greek Pronunciation

The following pronunciation guide is wrong. The motivation for making it deliberately incorrect is

described later. It also uses a script which is not used by all Greek by any means. For information,

see the notes after the tables. Again, I assume a Mancunian pronunciation for English unlessotherwise stated:

Capital Lowercase/minuscule Name Pronunciation

A Alpha Man

B Beta Bus

Gamma Gum

D Delta Dot

E Epsilon Men

Z Zeta Haze

H Eta Feed

Theta Think

Iota Bit

Kappa Kit

Lambda Land

Mu Mood

Nu Night

Xi Axe, never Xylophone

Omicron Bomb

Pi Pink

Rho Road (trilled)

, Sigma Sand

Tau Tooth

Upsilon I in Machine

Phi F in Foot

Chi CH in loch

Psi PS in Apse

Omega Load

There are also the hard and soft breathings and iota subscript. The hard breathing is a signplaced over lowercase letters for an h sound and the soft, , represents its absence these are

written before capitals. They are placed before capitals and usually occur at the beginnings ofwords. These and other symbols were introduced in Byzantine times. The acute accent indicates

accent on that vowel. Iota subscript is a silent iota ( ) written under the line at the end of aword. There are a number of other marks and accents because Greek has been a tonal language, but

this is just the beginning!


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Diphthongs

As in house As in mice As in Europe

As in ace As in pace As e in cafe becoming oo in moon. As in void. As in soon - not a diphthong except in early times. As in awful.

Important Note Why this is deliberately inaccurate

This guide to pronunciation is vague and inaccurate for a good reason. The earliest written Greek

may be four thousand years old and it is still spoken today. Over that time there have naturally beenmany changes in pronunciation and there is no definitive answer to how Greek should be pronounced. I have therefore chosen a simple version, close to English but not particularly

authentic, mainly to facilitate the pronunciation of words taken into English from Greek. There

now follows a long history of the Greek language and the ways of writing it, which goes into moredetail

History of the Greek language

In a sense, Greek is a very old language which is still spoken. The language referred to as Latinwas relatively short-lived as a first language, appearing several centuries after the start of the Iron

Age and no longer being learnt in that form by young children as the Dark Age ensued.

Greek is not like this. Due to a controversial archaeological artefact called the Phaistos Disc, Greek

may have been written down very early, but was in any case spoken near the start of the Bronze Ageby about 2000 BCE. Its form at the time may have been quite similar to the ancestor of the majority

of European and North Indian languages, Proto-Indoeuropean. It continued to be spoken as a firstlanguage throughout the Bronze Age and into the current Iron Age, which began about three

thousand years ago, right up to the present day and into the future, in various forms, but in a more

unified manner than Latin, which split into scholarly Latin and the diverse Romance tongues nowspoken through much of Europe and in many former colonies such as Latin America and much of

Africa. By contrast, Greek is only spoken widely in Mediterranean Europe and Cyprus and

historically in the modern Turkey and the empire established by Alexander the Great, though it isalso used as an academic language. Unlike Latin, Greek is in the more diverse half of the Indo-

European language family along with tongues which tend to be spoken further east, such as theNorth Indian and Iranian languages, the Baltic and Slavic speeches of Eastern Europe, the isolated

Armenian language and Romany. Although it uses its own alphabet, it was previously written inother scripts and its alphabetic script is ancestral to our own Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet,

Coptic and Gothic (not to be confused with Black Letter, which is a mediaeval script used in

Northern Europe). Greek is one of the oldest languages still spoken as a mother tongue, though

similar claims can be made for Welsh, Basque and Chinese. Coptic is much older but hasn't beenused for many centuries outside religious circumstances.


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The Phaistos Disc

A tantalising artefact which seems to date from the early Bronze Age and may be the earliestexample of Greek writing, this is a round clay tablet which seems to have been found in the ruins of

an ancient palace in Crete. It may or may not be in Greek and may not even be writing, but

remarkably, seems to have been printed using movable type, an invention which did not come intocommon use in Europe until three and a half thousand years later if the alleged age is correct. The

disc has not been dated but may have been manufactured about 2000 BCE, if it is not a hoax. Thereis also the Arkalochori Axe, apparently of a similar age, which bears similar symbols, found in a

cave on Crete.

There are, however, a large number of interpretations of what this is, usually suggesting that it is

writing but sometimes that it's a calendar or a game board, among other things. It may not be local.


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Linear B

After the destruction of the Minoan civilisation by a volcanic explosion, the Mycenaean people

moved into Crete and nearby islands, using the first writing which was uncontroversially Greek.This may first appear on the Kafkania Pebble on the Greek mainland, dating from earlier, but again,this may be a hoax. Linear B, however, is by no means a hoax, though it took a long time to

decipher due to the absence of a Rosetta Stone-like text with writing in a known language. It is asyllabary rather than an alphabet each symbol stands at least for a consonant followed by a vowel

or a vowel alone and also includes ideographic signs signs for whole words.

It has been suggested that there are connections between Linear B and certain other distant writing

systems such as the Indus Valley script. It was uncontroversially used on Crete in the late BronzeAge, from about 1400 BCE to about 1200 BCE. At that point, an event referred to as the Bronze

Age Collapse took place, possibly caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the invasion of the

Peoples of the Sea (the ancestors of the Philistines) or possibly by the start of ironworking andtherefore superior weaponry. It may also have been a more general, systemic emergence of an

insoluble problem linked to the nature of the society concerned. Whatever the cause, this led to aDark Age in the eastern Mediterranean, the disappearance of the palaces and the end of literacy for

the whole civilisation, and occurred throughout the region.

This was the beginning of what would later be called the Homeric Age, the period during which the

epics concerning Odysseus and the Trojan War are set. Trade links were lost, palaces wereabandoned and the isolated communities became diverse due to lack of contact. The extraction of

iron was learnt in this time, spread from elsewhere. The Phoenician traders also gave them their

alphabet, which led to the development of all Western scripts associated with European cultures as

well as several others a number of letters were adapted to express vowels, which were not writtendown by the Phoenicians. The earliest alphabetic Greek inscriptions date from around 750 BCE atthe latest.


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Archaic Greek alphabet

There were originally twenty-seven letters in the Greek alphabet and also some variation. This

longer alphabet included these extra letters:

Digamma, also known as wau, or lowercase , written as when it stands for a number. This

represents a w sound, which had vanished by the time the Odyssey was written down in about750 BCE, but its absence sometimes shows up in lines which don't scan because it's missing. An

example of its use would be in the archaic word - newos, later - new, clearly

cognate with the English word. The letter form itself remained in Latin and became our F.

Qoph: , . This letter became the Latin Q and was used instead of K before back vowels such as

omicron and omega. In Phoenician, it was pronounced like a K but with the uvula. The Latin QU

is the sound which became wh in English and its relatives such as Gothic.

Sampi: . The final letter of the archaic alphabet, this is written in words which have variable

spellings where letters vary between T and such as - four. It could be ts, but the true

sound is uncertain.

These letters were lost from the regular Greek alphabet but were retained in one form of thenumerical notation used, the other being acrostic. These are as follows:

Letter Number Letter Number Letter Letter

1 10 100

2 20 200

3 30 300

4 40 400

5 50 500

6 60 600

7 70 700

8 80 800

9 90 900

1000

Greek numbers were written using combinations of these letters. Therefore, the number 666 wouldbe written . These were distinguished from ordinary letters by the sign ' afterwards. However,

it also implies that every word also has a numerical value. The number 10 000 was represented byan M for myriad. This system became more sophisticated the way it's described here is known as

the Ionic numeral system, dating from about 400 BCE. Prior to that, the Attic system was used,

which used I for 1 and the first letters of each Greek word for each number 5, 10, 100, 1000 and 10 000. This system was somewhat like Roman numerals.

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