My Favourite Letter in the Greek Alphabet

Greek is a cool language. It’s one of the oldest languages out there and it dips its toes in so many other languages. Even with modern English, we still use bits of Greek, squished and squashed into Latin before moving into our home language. When ancient languages mix with English, weird things can happen.

Before we can start though, we kinda need to talk about the Greek alphabet.

It’s not as hard as it looks.

The Greek alphabet at first glance genuinely looks a bit scary. We have a few letters that sound and look the same. But we also have not only letters that don’t make the same sounds in Greek, as well as letters that look nothing like our familiar Latin-based letters. The good news though is that pronunciation is actually pretty strict. Every Greek letter makes a specific sound, so we don’t have words like “through” or “neighborhood”.

The only exception to this comes from vowels. If you put another vowel in front of the letter ι, then the sound becomes a -ee sound. An α in front of an ι makes an -eh sound. And ο and υ together makes an oo sound. Finally, ε and υ together make an -ev sound and α and υ together make an -av sound.

Once you know the alphabet, you can read pretty much any word. Even if you don’t know what the word means, at least you can speak it

The translation loses some sounds.

However, with a lot of words taken from Greek, we kinda lose the emphasis of how the letters work. The change from Greek letters into English letters actually cause pronunciations to not translate too well either way. What makes things weird is how Greek-based words turn into Latin-based words.

A good example of this are words like “psychologist”. The word is similar in Greek, Ψυχολόγος. But the pronunciation is very different. In Greek, it’s pronounced “P-See-koh-LOH-gohs”. The first letter, Ψ is a hard PS sound, and is actually pronounced. Think of it like the word “crisps” where the P does get spoken. In English though, most of the time we don’t pronounce the PS sound at all.

And, finally, my favourite letter.

My favourite letter in the Greek Alphabet is Ξ. Capital letter Ξ lowercase letter ξ. Look how lovely these letters are.

What is Ξ? Quite simple, Ξ (Ksi) is the sound of a hard X, like “extra”. It’s a hard sound that makes me happy. What I like about it most is that Ξ has a very alien look to it, it doesn’t quite mesh well with English letters. In fact, Ξ is a lot like the letter Ψ I mentioned above. Sometimes, when converting into English, the hard KS sound is replaced with a Z sound. Xylophone, the musical instrument, is pronounced with a soft X/Z. However, in Greek, that X becomes a Ξ and is pronounced “KSI-loh-foh-noh”. The Ξ has disappeared in the translation. Which is a shame because the hard Ξ is so interesting.

Meanwhile, the letter Χ in Greek is actually a soft H sound, a cross between H on its own and CH. Although this does somewhat change sounds, becoming more of a CH and less of an H sound as you move away from Greece. In Cypriot Greek, all the harder sounds are much stronger than they are in Normal Greek.

Took us a while to get here. So if you are still here, give yourselves a pat on the back. You earned it.