🚀 go-pugleaf

I sort of shifted the discussion to pronounciation since asking why X
is pronounced z really is about that anyway.

You have to be careful. Greek usage radiated in all directions.
A lot of "scholars" make the mistake of only studying the westward one,
esp because "classics" study Greek with Latin.

Spanish seems to have the closest pronounciation to the most customary
Greek-Latin transliterations. I once had a Cuban boss and when she
adressed me as "Mr Panayotoulos" (when most folks misponounce it
"Pan-tza-toh-pew-lous") I replied "Malista!" in surprise.. I don't
know why, but Spanish is supposed to have retained more Latin than
Italian.. and Greek, Latin, Romanian and Albanian are supposed to have
derived from the same proto-Messogian language that came to the region
with the second IndoEuropean wave..

Russians and other Slavs also do above-average in pronouncing Greek,
because the cross-cultural links have been more recent and have thusly
atrophied less. In the "west", lack of contact, allowed for
significant deformations to take place in the understanding and
speaking of Greek..

But you have to also study Hebrew and Hindu and Persian
transliterations.  In the Septuagint of the Old Testament, there is a
section which starts "Aleph, Beth, Gimmel.." which is a good starting
point.. W Syndey Allen's Vox Graeca falls apart when he tries to
explain why Hindu coins don't follow his theory on ypsilon, for
example.. then there's a whole bunch of very stupid mistakes made by
some otherwise intelligent people on things that happened in 800 BC
being applied to Greek as it was spoken in 200 BC or 200 AD, because
they apply the word "ancient" unrigorously.. and Greeks can become
lazy and make the differences seem greater than they are.. a
cantankerous Greek can complain a lot more about reading Sophocles
than a stuck-up Brit about Shakespeare, even though the differences in
the language are actually about the same (because formation of a body
of literature tends to freeze up change)..

Here's a US-English attempt at modern Greek pronounciation

Alpha - a
Beta (vita) -  v
Gamma (w'amma)- (a cross between y, w and gh)
Delta (dthelta) - th (hard)
Epsilon - e (eh-psilon, means eh-high)
Zita - z
Eta (ita) - ee ( half-way between i and e if you listen closely enough )
Theta (thita) - th (soft)
Iota - i
Kappa - k
Lamda (lamtha) - l
Mu (as in the word "me")  - m
Nu  (nih)  - n
Ksi (ksih - as if prefixing "see" with a "k")  - x (ks)
Omicron - o (o-micron, means o-small)
Pi (as in [sorry!] the word "pee") - p
Rho - r
Sigma (si'w'ma) - s
Tau (taf) - t
Ypsilon - y (y-grec in some laguages - ih-psilon meand ih-high)
Phi (as in the word "fee") - f
Chi (as in the word "he") - h (guttoral, as in kh)
Psi (psie) - ps
Omega - o (oh-mega, means oh-big)

Maybe this provides another clue: In my aunt's neighborhood in Athens
there was a widowed Swiss woman who had married a Greek and lived most
of her life in Greece. After forty-odd years you could only notice a
hissing sound in her pronounciation that gave her a way as possibly
being non-Greek, but most people thought she just had something wrong
with her throat.


				- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bioengineer-Financier, NYC
   BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian http://WWW.Dorsai.Org/~vjp2
               vjp2@{MCIMail.Com|CompuServe.Com|Dorsai.Org}
   ---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---