[B-Greek] Pronouncing letter names

Finny Kuruvilla kuruvill at fas.harvard.edu
Thu Oct 2 23:57:52 EDT 2003


On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Blake T. Garretson wrote:

> I'm learning NT Greek from books, and while they tell you how to 
> pronounce the sounds the letters make, they don't tell how to correctly 
> pronounce the letter name itself.  I'm an engineer, so I'm quite 
> familiar with all of the letters (via equations and formulas), but  I 
> suspect  engineering professors are the worst source for correct Greek 
> pronounciation!
> 
> What's the "right" way to prounce the letter xi?  "Zee" or "zie" (rhymes 
> with pie)?  Does "chi" rhyme with "pie", or is it pronounced "key"?  
> Same with psi and phi?  I've had some profs say "fee", and some "fie".

One helpful page to check out is:

http://www.biblicalgreek.org/links/pronunciation.html

It goes through all the letters and how they are pronounced in various
schemes -- Erasmian, historic Attic, historic biblical (though this
one is debatable), and modern.

Best to choose one scheme and stick with it.  Most people on this list
probably learned and still use the Erasmian, but the historic biblical
and modern pronnciation schemes are becoming more and more popular.

NIKWS TWi CRISTWi,
Finny

*****************************************************************
Finny Kuruvilla, MD, PhD
Resident physician in clinical pathology
Brigham & Women's Hospital - Boston, Massachusetts
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~kuruvill/home




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