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 unless otherwise stated: Capital A B D E Z H Lowercase/minuscule , Name Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iota Kappa Lambda Mu Nu Xi Omicron Pi Rho Sigma Tau Upsilon Phi Chi Psi Omega Pronunciation Man Bus Gum Dot Men Haze Feed Think Bit Kit Land Mood Night Axe, Xylophone Bomb Pink Road (trilled) Sand Tooth I in Machine F in Foot CH in loch PS in Apse Load never

There are also the hard and soft breathings and iota subscript. The hard breathing is a sign placed 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 of words. 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 a word. There are a number of other marks and accents because Greek has been a tonal language, but this is just the beginning!

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 been many 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 more detail History of the Greek language In a sense, Greek is a very old language which is still spoken. The language referred to as Latin was 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 Age by 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 first language 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 now spoken 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 is also used as an academic language. Unlike Latin, Greek is in the more diverse half of the IndoEuropean language family along with tongues which tend to be spoken further east, such as the North 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 in other 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 been used for many centuries outside religious circumstances.

The Phaistos Disc

A tantalising artefact which seems to date from the early Bronze Age and may be the earliest example 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 into common 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. There is 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.

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 a syllabary 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 Bronze Age, 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 and therefore 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 a Dark 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 were abandoned 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 written down by the Phoenicians. The earliest alphabetic Greek inscriptions date from around 750 BCE at the latest.

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 about 750 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 the numerical notation used, the other being acrostic. These are as follows: Letter

Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Letter

Number 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90

Letter

Letter 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000

Greek numbers were written using combinations of these letters. Therefore, the number 666 would be 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 by an 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.