View Single Post
  #24  
Old 06-14-2002, 04:23 PM
MysticCat MysticCat is offline
GreekChat Member
 
Join Date: May 2002
Location: A dark and very expensive forest
Posts: 12,737
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.
__________________
AMONG MEN HARMONY
1898
Reply With Quote