Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet predates our Roman one, and is considered the first phonetic alphabet. Indeed, the word "alphabet" is merely the names of the first two Greek letters.
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet predates our Roman one, and is considered the first phonetic alphabet. Indeed, the word "alphabet" is merely the names of the first two Greek letters.
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Nevertheless, it's quite unsettling to come upon a road sign that offers you choices that look like those at left -- the towns and villages we actually visited. At first, we struggled to decode the simplest words, but after awhile, and with a decoding sheet like the one below, we were able to get around pretty handily. |
Greek is a very regular language, like Spanish, which is refreshing after the blatant irregularity of English. A large number of our words come from Greek roots, and so the decoding often results in a satisfying Aha! Every Greek word of two or more syllables has an accented vowel to denote the emphasized syllable.
The pronunciation of the letters, although regular, has some unexpected quirks. Ghamma is a guttural gh sound except before e and i sounds, in which case it's a y as in yes. Hi is pronounced like the ch in the Scottish word loch -- also guttural -- except before e and i sounds, in which case it's an h as in hue. Yiota is pronounced as a long i as in Maria except before the a and o sounds, when it's like the y in yes. Otherwise, the sounds are well described by their transliterated names shown at right.
A word about transliteration: erratic. Depending on the native language of the transliterator, or in the case of Greek transliterators, the phase of the moon and their aesthetic preference for certain letters and combinations, the same word may be represented as many as six different ways. This works in either direction ways; English words phonetically transliterated into Greek often suffer amazing indignities. The initial B, as is Butler, is usually represented mi-pi. |  |
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