Pronouncing Ancient Greek

It's much easier to pronounce Ancient Greek words than it looks at first. The funny alphabet is a bit off-putting, but really, once you've got the idea, it's straightforward.

The exact soundings as you would have heard them on the streets of Classical Athens have been lost. Greek is a living language which evolved! There are different theories about the ancient pronounciation and (surprise!) they don't entirely agree with each other. Fortunately, none of us are likely to fall through a time vortex into the ancient past, so if we stuff it up, no one who matters will ever know.

There were a zillion different dialects of Ancient Greek. If you lived back then, you could probably have spotted someone's city the moment they opened their mouths. We're going to ignore all the dialects but one: Attic -- the dialect of Athens. Attic Greek is the language of Pericles and Socrates and Nicolaos and Diotima and Plato and Euripides and Sophocles.

Attic Greek became the trading language of the Mediterranean. As it spread, it evolved rapidly, and became known as koine. The koine dialect is hugely important to this day, because it just happens to be the language in which the Bible was written. It's also the ancestor of Modern Greek.

The sound variations between dialects are real, but not big enough to worry someone who only wants to read Ancient Greek words in a book. So I'll ignore them all and give you a single sound system which works.

My Ancient Greek is very limited, by the way, and there are people reading this blog who are practically fluent. If you are one of those clever people I sincerely hope you'll correct any errors in comments. I'd like to learn something too! So with that caveat, here goes...

Α, α	a	father	alpha
Β, β	b	bob	beta
Γ, γ	g	got	gamma
Δ, δ	d	dad	delta
Ε, ε	e	get	epsilon
Ζ, ζ	z	adze	zeta
Η, η	ê	fête	eta
Θ, θ	th	thoth	theta
Ι, ι	i	hit or ski (take your choice)	iota
Κ, κ	k	kit kat	kappa
Λ, λ	l	let	lambda
Μ, μ	m	met	mu
Ν, ν	n	net	nu
Ξ, ξ	x	box	xi
Ο, ο	o	okay	omikron
Π, π	p	pop	pi
Ρ, ρ	r	rat	rho
Σ, σ, ς	s	sat	sigma
Τ, τ	t	sat	tau
Υ, υ	y	oops!	upsilon
Φ, φ	ph	phone	phi
Χ, χ	ch	khaki	chi
Ψ, ψ	ps	pssst!	psi
Ω, ω	ô	note or saw (take your choice)	omega

There were also these diphthongs (vowels which combined to form a single sound):

ai as in aisle
ei as in fate
oi as in oil (very important to me because it's used for plurals)
ay as in cow (recall the y transliteration makes an oo sound)
ey as in feud
oy as in soup

Notice there are two letters for the different o sounds, where we have one to handle both.

Also there are effectively three letters for our e & i sounds.

The ch of Greek is much like the ch of German. Which means try to say a k while clearing your throat. No sane English speaker wants to do this. You can get away with a kh.

The z, too, is like a German z, which is a tz or a dz sound. Take your pick.

There is no j sound at all. This means Janet is safe from me making her a character.

Loretta asked in the comments of a previous post how to pronounce Phaedo (the title of a book by Plato). That's a fantastic question, because it opens up a small can of worms. An awful lot of Greek stuff comes to us via the Romans. The Romans spoke Latin, obviously, but all educated Romans spoke Greek too. Koine, in fact. But they mangled Greek names just like the Greeks mangled Persian names. And many Greek texts come to us via Latin translations. Here is the name of Plato's book Phaedo, in Greek:

Φαίδων

Try your newly acquired transliteration skills on this word. Notice anything odd?

That's right, the Romans dropped the final n. The "correct" transliteration is Phaidon, and since the ai is a diphthong as per above, the "correct" pronounciation is

FIDE - OWN

The reality is, though, when you're reading a book you really should pronounce the funny words however you feel like. It's not like the historical Phaidon is going to sue you for mispronouncing his name, and it's far more important that you're comfortable. I put a character list at the start of my first book, in which I gave suggested pronounciations for the characters. I didn't even bother looking at my own transliteration chart when I wrote it; I just put in what I thought would be easiest for modern readers to say.

But! If you're looking for something that sounds "accurate". This chart will do the job.