Okay, so, the first thing that always trips everyone up is the alphabet but DON’T PANIC; it’s actually not that different from the Roman alphabet (which is what English uses) – it’s sort of halfway between Roman and Cyrillic. It was adapted from the alphabet which was used by Phoenician traders who visited Greece around 700 BC, maybe a little earlier, and is therefore a cousin of the Hebrew alphabet. The Greeks reworked it quite a bit, though – the Phoenician alphabet had no vowels (the Greek alphabet was the first in the region to make that particular innovation) so they took some of the less important consonants and used them as vowels instead (for instance, aleph, the Phoenician equivalent to alpha, originally made a strange sort of choking noise that I’ve never quite been able to do). Anyway, here we go…
Α α – Alpha. You all know this one; it’s an “ah” sound, and can be either long – like in “Gengar” – or short – like in “Gyarados.”
Β β – Beta. That’s right; it’s a “b” sound – but be careful because in modern Greek it makes a “v” sound and is pronounced “veeta" (that sound doesn’t exist in ancient Greek).
Γ γ – Gamma. A "g” sound. A double gamma – γγ – makes an “ng” sound, like in “Chingling." Something similar happens with γκ, γξ and γχ; the gamma makes an "n” or “ng” sort of sound (as in, say, Shinx).
Δ δ – Delta. The Greek “d." The English word "delta” – meaning the area where a river forks just as it meets the sea, creating a whole lot of little islands – comes from the shape of a capital delta – Δ.
Ε ε – Epsilon. A short “e,” like the sound in “Tangela” or “Shellder." To be distingushed from eta, which I’ll come to in a bit.
Ζ ζ – Zeta. This is not quite a "z” sound – it’s an “sd” or “zd" sound, like in "Misdreavus,” which means that the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, is actually pronounced something like “Zdyoos” in ancient Greek.
Η η – Eta. This is the long “e," and in English we often use an "a” to make this sound; it’s the sound that you find in, say, “Wailmer,” “Banette,” or “Rayquaza." Yes, the capital looks exactly like an H, but don’t let that fool you – there’s actually no letter in ancient Greek that makes the "h” sound. More on that later.
Θ θ – Theta. A “th” sound, but be careful; it’s not the soft “th” we have in English, it’s a hard sound like in “Hoothoot." Beware modern Greek once again, where θ makes the soft English "th,” δ makes this hard “th” (and is known as “thelta”), and, having exhausted all the other letters, the Greeks are forced to use ντ to make a “d” sound.
Ι ι – Iota. An “i” sound, which like α can be short – as in “Hitmonchan” – or long, which is a sound often made by “ee” in English – as in “Hitmonlee." It’s the origin of the English phrase "it doesn’t matter one iota” – a story I’ll tell you some other time.
Κ κ – Kappa. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Λ λ – Lambda. The “l” sound. You might have seen this symbol on pictures of Greek hoplite shields. As a matter of tradition, all Spartans had the same shield device: Λ, the first letter of Λακεδαιμων, which is the Spartans’ word for themselves. So, yeah, while other Greeks have pictures of gorgons or thunderbolts or whatever, the Spartans go into battle waving a big capital L. Now that’s confidence.
Μ μ – Mu. The “m” sound (shockingly enough.) This is the funny little symbol that appears in μm (micrometres), μg (micrograms) and so on.
N ν – Nu. Yes, it’s an “n” but the little one looks like a “v.” No, I don’t care.
Ξ ξ – Xi. An “x” sound. A lowercase xi is just about the fiddliest god-damn letter in the whole language and you would best avoid them.
Ο ο – Omikron. A short “o,” like the sound in “Rhydon” or “Onix.” The name of this letter, omikron, literally means “the little o” – ο μικρον (think “micro” in English).
Π π – Pi. You recognise this from your maths class, right? I hope so, anyway. Pi is a “p” sound (though it’s worth noting that the name of the letter, “pi,” is actually pronounced the same way as the English equivalent – “pee” – not “pie” as it’s usually pronounced in maths and physics).
Ρ ρ – Rho. Yes, I know it looks like a p, but it’s actually an “r” sound – or, more accurately, an “rh” sound, since Greek r’s are always rolled and have a bit of breath behind them.
Σ σ ς – Sigma. An “s” sound. There are two variants to the lower-case sigma – the second one, ς, is used only at the end of a word, while the first is used everywhere else.
Τ τ – Tau. It looks like a “t.” It is a “t.” Praise the gods.
Υ υ – Upsilon. This is the Greek “u,” and the sound it makes is a bit tricky to get right because it’s not exactly like an English u – it’s almost more like an “ew” sound, a little like the sound on the end of “Pachirisu” but not quite. Best not to worry too much about it.
Φ φ – Phi. This is the origin of the English “ph,” but like θ it’s not quite the same as our equivalent – it’s a harder sound. No-one’s going to call you out if you just pronounce it like an “f,” though.
Χ χ – Chi. This is NOT a “ch” sound. Get that notion OUT of your head. That sound – the sound in, say, “Pikachu” – does not exist in Greek. Chi is best pronounced as a sort of hacking noise in the back of your throat, but if you can’t manage that you should go with the hard “kh” sound in “Chimecho” or “Archeops.” Incidentally, this letter is the reason why calling the abbreviation “Xmas” an “attack on Christmas,” as people sometimes do, is horrifyingly ignorant and fundamentally absurd – X has been used for more than a thousand years as an abbreviation for the Greek word Χριστος – Christ.
Ψ ψ – Psi. This is probably the least-used letter in the whole alphabet, and makes a “ps” sound, like at the end of “Kabutops” and “Dusclops.”
Ω ω – Omega. This is the twin to omikron, the “big O” (ω μεγα). It makes a long “oh” sound, as in “Electrode” or “Tauros.”
There are also some combinations of vowels that are important to know:
αυ – this makes an “ow” sound, like in “Drowzee” or “Meowth.”
οι – this makes an “oy” sound, like in “Baltoy” or “Cloyster.”
αι – this makes the sound we think of in English as a long i, the sound in “Scyther” or “Mr. Mime.”
ει – this makes a long “e” sound which, to my ears, is indistinguishable from the sound of an eta, but supposedly there is a subtle difference.
ευ – this makes a “yu” sound like the sound in “Kyurem” or “Staryu.”
ηυ – this makes a weird sort of “eouw” sound that I don’t think we have in English, or in Pokémon for that matter. It doesn’t turn up very often, so feel free to disregard it.
Next thing is accent marks.
Greek has three types of accent marks – the acute ά, the grave ὰ, and the circumflex ᾶ, and most words will have one of them somewhere. However, accent in ancient Greek does not work the same way as it does in most European languages (or, for that matter, in modern Greek) – most European languages have a stress accent, meaning that we place heavier emphasis on one syllable in each word. Ancient Greek, like Chinese, has a pitch accent – the speaker’s pitch rises and falls as he or she speaks. The acute accent indicates a rising pitch, the grave a falling pitch, and the circumflex a brief rise followed immediately by a fall. There are very few people who can speak Greek like this today; it has a beautiful melodic quality to it, as though the speaker is singing. I can manage a few lines, given time to practice them beforehand. You can probably ignore the accent marks without feeling too guilty about it (honestly, I never learned where the accents go on most words).
What you cannot ignore is breathing marks. I mentioned earlier that Greek has no letter for the “h” sound. Instead, any word that begins with a vowel will have a little apostrophe-like mark over the first letter (or the second letter, if the word begins with one of those double-letter sounds I listed above). It looks like this: ἀ or ἁ, αἰ or αἱ. If the mark curves inward, like ἀ, it’s a ‘smooth’ breathing, and the word does not begin with an h sound. If it curves outward, like ἁ, it’s a ‘rough’ breathing, and the word does begin with an h sound. Breathings only appear on words that begin with vowels – an ancient Greek word never has an h sound in the middle. A word that begins with a rho – there are very few – will always have a rough breathing, like this ῥ, because the letter rho is always pronounced with some breath behind it.
The other little thing that pops up from time to time in Greek spelling is the iota subscript. Alpha, eta and omega will occasionally have a little iota hanging out underneath, like this ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ. This may have had a subtle impact on the pronunciation, we’re not sure, but you can probably just pronounce these as regular alphas, etas and omegas – just pay attention to them when reading and writing, because words and forms that have them are very easy to identify. If a word is spelled with an iota subscript, it means that the word used to have an iota in it, in an older form of the language – or possibly in one of the other dialects. We normally teach and learn Attic Greek, the dialect spoken in and around Athens, but there were a number of other dialects used in other regions of Greece, such as Doric (the Spartan dialect), Ionic (the dialect spoken along the coast of Turkey) and Arcado-Cypriot (the dialect spoken in the two far-separated regions of Cyprus and Arcadia – based purely on its distribution, Arcado-Cypriot is probably the most similar to the ‘ancestral’ Greek from which all the dialects evolved). Attic is actually one of the most bizarre and demented dialects of the lot, but since the Athenians were the most prolific writers, most of the examples of written Greek that survive are in Attic, so we just have to deal with it.
More to follow.
Pokémaniacal 