Greek Letter Upsilon
 

first of all..
the greek letter upsilon i have heard pronounced UP-silon and OOPS-ilon.. personally my sorority chapter is Kappa Upsilon and we pronounce it UP-silon.. i suppose thats the same as FEE and PHI...

Second of all..
i see Upsilon as a Y alot of the time, but also as another symbol, which is similar to a Y but with long swirls coming down, i wish i could show it, but there is no font with it included in it... we use the little greek symbol but so many people comment that it should be "just a y" GRRRR...
Our sorority is allowed to wear our chapter letters on our shirts as well as out national letters, and we wear the Upsilon...

please, if anyone can let me know about their GLO and upsilon i'd be so grateful!! :)

remember.. no matter the letter, greeks do it better!


*edited for a stupid grammar error ;)*

the letter upsilon looks like a Y but has the top part hanging down. My sorority is Phi Sigma Sigma but my pledge class is upsilon....so that's how i know

In Alpha Chi Rho, the letter Upsilon is taboo and is never used:

A chapter, Phi Upsilon, was founded at the University of Iowa in 1899; but the members, being at a great distance from the other chapters and dissatisfied with the youth of the fraternity, developed disloyalty in 1901, and the fraternity in 1902 expelled the entire chapter and the remaining members joined the local chapter of Kappa Sigma.

From that day on, no chapter would use the letter. That's our take on the letter Upsilon. So we probably pronounce the letter as OOPS-silon considering our situation :)

AXPAlum

Upsilon
 

I'm a brother of Kappa Psi Upsilon, and we call it UPS-ilon, not OOPSilon....although I've heard that the correct pronunciation is OOPSilon....no biggie though...As for the symbol, I agree with sigkapdancer.

Joe

Y is the common form of the greek alphabet but is curled over and it is pronouced up- silon!

Same thing as xi or z-eye. The Greek Pronuciation and I mean Greece Greek is oopssilon!

Hope this helps!

Are you a member of both Phi Sigma Sigma and Sigma Kappa? (I am assuming the sigkap in your name stands for Sigma Kappa because that's what the SK's at my school call themselves)

I was taught that it is against the rules to be a member of more than one NPC organization. Is that true?

Ok I have another pronunciation to throw in there......at my school the DU's (and everyone else) pronounced it YOOPsilon.....

My chapter designation is Phi Upsilon.

We pronounce it Phi - OOpsilon.

We shorten it to Phi -OOp. Like, "Mike, hes an alum, he's Phi-OOp 223." (His number)

WHen others come down here they refer to it as Phi - UP silon. THey might have well busted out with the "Eh" like they do in canada for all the looks they get.

I have always heard it as 'Ooop'silon, or for example: Delta 'Ooops' I joined the wrong fraternity. Just kidding.

I know that Alpha Phi (fee) has a reason why it is called that, rather than (fi), something to do with the pronunciation of the letters at that time in history??? Could be wrong though.

I guess it depends where YOU ALL are in the country and how ALL YA'LL parents raised ya.

I will tell you this though, if you are from Michigans Upper Penninsula, you'd be saying "Yooopsilon".

My sorority is Sigma Kappa. Someone got on the computer I use and accidentally didn't sign me off. Sorry for the confusion. :)

My fiance is a member of Delta Upsilon and every single one of them says "Yoopsilon". And I know people that work at their natl HQ and they say the same thing. So to me and everyone I know, yoopsilon.

Wow, i never knew that little piece of Iowa Greek history :D interesting that Iowa, the place people often confuse with Idaho (we're corn not potatoes) could change the way an entire org pronouces a word ;)

haha we are Kappa UP-silon, not oops or yoops...
we also use the little hangy down Y for upsilon..

Thanks so much for all the input.. some greek letter companies don't manufacture the Upsilon we use! GRRR...

the correct pronunciation
 

The correct wat to say Upsilion is U + psilon
It's not oops silion or ups silion. The u is long, so U + psilon.

I got it from a greek dictionary.

Kramer

AXPAlum,

Is there also any hesitance to use the letter Phi, since that was part of the chapter's name?

Edited to Add:
My bad - I just checked the chapter listing at greekpages.com, and there are a ton of chapter names with Phi. I guess that the Upsilon is what distinguished this chapter name from all others.

Re: Greek Letter Upsilon
 

"Alpha" is a vowel, and in the Greek language, when "Phi" follows a vowel and nothing follows the "Phi", it is pronounced FEE not FIE.

Alpha Phi = Alpha FEE
Alpha Phi Alpha = Alpha FIE Alpha

Hope that clears that up. :)

SATX*APhi! you cleared up alot there for me.. one of my best friends from back home joined alpha phi at Hofstra in NY and i just couldn't understand that.. thanks so much!

Really? So, do they use something that looks like an actual Y like in my sig?

No problem! :)

re: fee/feye
 

Hmm... so my chapter's name is Omicron Phi... does that mean we should be pronouncing it Omicron Fee? damn... that would mean we've been saying it wrong for 37 years..ouch.

Ginger, I think you're ok.

Alpha Phi = FEE
Alpha Epsilon Phi = FIE

I'm not sure what the logic is, but if it's pronounced FIE when it follows Epsilon, it's probably pronounced FIE when it follows Omicron.

Well, SATX*APhi stated that because Phi is the last letter, the rule stays. So it would be Omicron Fee..?

btw, does anyone know all the other vowels in the greek alphabet?

yes, serenity they do.. which is rather stupid,i think... we recently a place that uses the real upsilon though, which is great. :) unfortunately the letter upsilon in the symbol font is just a Y which is rather ridiculous if you ask me...

there are also letters in the greek alphabet which have been forgotten...

i think alpha and epsilon are vowels, not sure what else...

The Greek vowels are: A, E, H, I, O, U, and W.

BTW, I stand to be corrected, and an AF probably knows more about this than I do, but here goes anyway. I don't think the pronunciation of the letter F has anything to do with what letter it comes after. I mean, that's like saying you pronounce the letter "P" "pee" unless it comes after a vowel, when it is "pie." Everything else aside, when would this come up except when one is spelling a word.

My understanding, and again I may be way off, is that in Greek, the letter F is pronounced "phee." Similarly, in Greek, X is pronounced "ksee," P is pronounced "pee," C is pronounced "kee," and Y is pronounced "psee." This makes since I is pronounced "yota" or "eeota" in Greek -- "eye" as the sound for I is pretty unique to English.

In Britain F is still pronounced "fee" (can't say about the other letters), but in the US, we have anglicized most if not all of the Greek letters -- we say "al-fa," "kap-pa" and "gam-ma" (where the "a" sounds like the "a" in "cap") rather than "ahl-fa," kah-pa" and "gah-ma," for example. Seems to me that AF just prefers to use the correct Greek pronunciation of F.

FWIW.

There are words in English that change pronunciation depending on the words around them - example: "the" is pronounced "thee" if it precedes a word that starts with a vowel, and "thuh" (short e) if it precedes a word that starts with a consonant. So the idea of Phi having 2 different pronunciations isn't too shocking.

I always thought AEPhi pronounces it FIE because, although Epsilon is itself a vowel, it ends in an N (nu) which is a consonant, while Alpha Phi pronounces it FEE because Alpha ends in a vowel... but then, I studied Latin, not Greek :)

In any case, if we did change to FEE, we'd have to rewrite a *lot* of songs... :D

I know a Delta Upsilon and they pronounce it that way as well.

hey,

I don't understand the squiggly letter you guys are talking about...I took Greek (ancient not modern) and the lowercase for Upsilon is a u, just a itsy bit wavier and no stem, but no squiggles.
anyway, i say more oo- than u- but not quite..

My first Greek teacher pronounced them U-psilon and Fee (phi) but other profs have diff pronunciations

My greek book basically agrees with this - gives the supposed ancient greek pronunciation, then an anglicized or americanized pronunciation.

the squiggly upsilon is basically a Y with the ends hanging down so it looks like they used to be longer but droop down now.. kinda like an m with the middle stem longer. :)

i drew what we commonly freehand an upsilon as.. i *tried* to make a real upsilon in photoshop, but that was disasterous.. its basically this with a little dangly longer and it hangs out in like a half circle...

http://www.translucent-love.com/upsilon.jpg