Talk:Greek alphabet

English approximations of Ancient Greek sounds

@Katalophyromai: I'm uneasy about the English approximations for Ancient Greek sounds, even though they're sourced, and I recognize them as ones that I've seen before. Many of the approximations for vowels are misleading to some or most readers, because vowels differ so much between English dialects (see International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects).

I'll give a few examples. O in soft is a decent approximation for omicron (ο) in many dialects of British English and in Australian and New Zealand English, where it is pronounced [ɔ] (though usually spelled /ɒ/), but in most dialects of North American English, soft has the same vowel as father, so using this approximation leads people to pronounce omicron like alpha (α). I've often heard λόγος pronounced like *λάγας. (That gets on my nerves.)

Some are just bad, like i in bit as an approximation for short iota (ι), because in Ancient Greek it was probably a pretty close vowel [i] (so that short and long iota had about the same quality). I in bit might be a decent approximation in Australian English out of the major English dialects (where the vowel is often nearly close [i]), while in modern RP and New Zealand English as well as much of North American English I think it's close-mid to mid (and probably central or between front and central), so it's closer in quality to ε or ει than to short ι. So for most readers this approximation will lead to a very inaccurate pronunciation.

The consonant approximations are mostly good, except for word-initial b, d, g for beta, delta, gamma (β, δ, γ). Generally when word-initial, b, d, g are not fully voiced. (There isn't much pressure for them to be fully voiced in that position because they are distinguished from p, t, k by not being aspirated.) But beta, delta, and gamma were probably fully voiced in all positions, because otherwise they couldn't be distinguished from pi, tau, kappa (π, τ, κ). English intervocalic b, d, g would be a better approximation.

I'm not sure how to solve this. I'd like to qualify some approximations with dialects, change some, to remove others, and add better ones, but some or all of those actions are likely to conflict with WP:OR because I'm not basing this on sources. — Eru·tuon 20:34, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

@Erutuon: I must admit that I am not fully satisfied with the vowel approximates either. I think Keller & Russell 2012's approximations for iota and omicron are more reflective of how classics students in North America are taught to pronounce ancient Greek rather than how ancient Greek actually sounded. I think that Mastronarde 2013's approximations for those letters are probably much closer to the actual Attic Greek, but that source only gives approximations for those letters in French and German respectively. I used Keller & Russell 2012's mostly just because they gave English sounds, even though I do not think those sounds for those particular letters are actually very close to how Attic Greek sounded. I would be willing to remove Keller & Russell 2012's approximations for those letters and just leave Mastronarde 2013's.

Moving on to the consonant sounds you mentioned, for beta, Mastronarde 2013 says "like English b" and Keller & Russell 2012 just says "as b." The example of "better" comes from Groton 2013. For gamma, the example of "get" comes from Keller & Russell 2012, but Mastronarde 2013 gives "go" and Groton 2013 gives "gamble," both of which have the exact same sound. So all three sources agree on the initial hard g. Mastronarde 2013 says, "like French d (similar to English d, but English d tends to have a slight aspiration absent in the Greek)." Keller & Russell 2012 just says "as d." Groton 2013 gives the example of "delete." --Katolophyromai (talk) 23:04, 29 September 2018 (UTC)

"eta - [ɛː] - similar to a as in English late". Not even close in my accent! Wiktionary shows it as /leɪt/ (a diphthong, not a long monophthong). In my accent it's /læɪ̯t/. This gives me no idea how the sound was spoken. The closest English pronunciation is a nonrhotic "air" /ɛː(ɹ)/, although many English speakers say it as a diphthong: /ɛə(ɹ)/. Danielklein (talk) 05:26, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, the reason why I added the English analogues is because probably very few people reading this article will have any idea what IPA even is and virtually none of them will have the faintest clue how to read it. So, to make this article at least semi-useful to the average reader, I did what every college-level introductory Ancient Greek textbook I could find has done: I provided approximate English analogues for the letters, based on the analogues given in those very textbooks. Unfortunately, as you already know, pronunciations in English are often highly variable depending on a person's region, dialect, upbringing, and cultural background.

Another unfortunate factor is that many of Mastronarde 2013's analogues are in French, which we cannot assume all of the people reading this article will be familiar with and should therefore try to limit use of as much as possible. Keller & Russell 2012 more helpfully offers English analogues wherever possible, but, as the discussion above demonstrates, a few of them are less than stellar. I have removed Keller & Russell 2012's English analogue for the Classical Attic pronunciation of the letter eta. Unfortunately, as of right now, I am not currently aware of an English example used in another source that would be better.

The word "air" is certainly not going to work as an English analogue, because, for one thing, in General American English, "air" is often pronounced /eɪ̯əɹ/, which sounds nothing at all like /ɛː/, and also because I do not have any sources that specifically identify "air" as an example of an English analogue of the sound made by the Classical Greek letter eta. I will have a copy of W. Sidney Allen's book Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation of Classical Greek in my possession by the end of this month and I am hoping that that book will have some better information and examples in it than what I have been able to find so far in the Greek textbooks. Once I have that book, I am planning on working on this article some more and perhaps potentially working to bring it up to GA status. --Katolophyromai (talk) 08:00, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your edit! I believe that the sound /ɛː/ is sufficiently rare in English variants that there is no example that would work well for even a small subset of native English speakers. I think it will have to stay without an English example. Danielklein (talk) 03:12, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

From the table of examples, Ancient Greek has no letter for 'y' sound as in 'yellow'. What gives? PametUGlavu (talk) 11:25, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

Diacritics: Comma in words

The example of ό,τι is the only one that exists, as far as I'm concerned, and in this instance it is not referred to as a comma, rather a diastolē/diastoli (in Greek διαστολή) which is another name for the comma in Mathematics as well. Its invention and use is solely modern, as it is only seen in the word ό,τι , which didn't exist prior to Demotic/Modern Standard Greek. It is a modern substitute for the longer word οτιδήποτε, which is quite older, and means "whatever". Ό,τι has only moderly appeared, and the need to make a distinction between it and ότι (that, as used in the reported speech, not an indicative pronoun) which was already in use. In the spoken language, the two are very easy to differentiate, as they are used in completely different grammatical situations. So, it should be described as diastoli, not a comma. LightningLighting (talk) 12:49, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Lower-case tau representation

The lower-case tau is not represented throughout the article in the way it is usually seen as in the Greekalphabet.svg, shown in the infobox, which is the way users of Greek symbols are accustomed to read it. I attempted a couple of fixes, but none worked. Is there any experienced user who knows how to fix this?Gciriani (talk) 13:27, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

This is just a matter of font differences, so I'm not sure there's really anything to fix. By default, we use the same standard sans-serif text fonts for displaying Greek as for displaying Latin text. The exact shape of the letters shown will depend on your system, but most systems will have these simple letter shapes, where, for instance, lower-case "τ" will have a straiɡht stem, without the curvy end you probably expected. These are optimized for screen readability and are what native Greek readers would expect in reading modern Greek texts online. The difference between these shapes is really no more significant in Greek than the difference between serif and sans-serif font shapes is in Latin. If you prefer a different font, you could play around with your personal CSS style settings, but I don't think we'd want to change the default reading experience for all readers. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:34, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

For the pronunciation

May I suggest to use a sound file for each letter? rather than describing it how to pronounce. Jackzhp (talk) 12:27, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Y

What Mastronarde writes about the pronunciation of Y in Ancient Greek is nonsense since u in French lune and ruse have the same length. What he writes about German equivalents is misleading since the long and short y in German differ in pronunciation, not only in length. --Espoo (talk) 05:59, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, our article on French phonology states that French vowels tend to be pronounced longer when followed by a voiced fricative, so ruse might really have a longer vowel than lune, even if it's not a phonemic distinction. It's true that the tense/lax pairs of languages like English and German are probably a poor analogy. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:53, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Omicron like German ohne?

The article says that the letter omicron is pronounced like the letter oh in the German word ohne. I know very little German, but isn't ohne pronounced with a long initial vowel, /ˈoːnə/? Imerologul Valah (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:18, 20 June 2022 (UTC)