The equivalent in English is the consonant in mom and meme. It’s one of the few symbols still present in the Greek alphabet that went into Latin and English unchanged. This letter, which resembles a horned owl, was used by the Egyptians who, in turn, took it from Semitic. Thus, this is the sound we use in English in words like love and lost. While the Greeks use the letter with the angle pointing upwards, the Romans turned it on its side to become the Latin “L”. The letter “λ”, which has the shape of an angle, comes directly from the Semitic alphabet. It was adopted directly from the Semitic languages without any changes and also passed into Latin and English to represent the “k” sound. Kappa is one of the most transparent consonants in the Greek alphabet. The English equivalents would be the short vowel sound as in sit, and the first element in the diphthong /ɪə/, as in beer. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 10. Yota is the letter in the Greek writing system used to represent the “i” vowel in both Ancient and Modern Greek. In fact, the symbol is still used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent this consonant sound. It represents the tip of the tongue placed between the front teeth in the open mouth, as when an English speaker says thin or think. The symbol for theta actually used to exist in Old English, but was replaced by the “th”. However, this Greek alphabet letter is still romanised as H. Originally denoting the consonant “h” as in hot, its sound value has shifted through time to denote the sound produced by the doubling of letter e, as in bee and meet. It’s the sound that we use in English to say things like zoo and zoom. The letter “zeta”, for example, was taken directly from the Semitic alphabet.
Ζήτα – ZĪlthough Greek is an ancient language itself, much of the Greek alphabet comes from even older languages. It’s the sounds we produce to say words like egg or met. Έψιλον – EĪs a sound, this letter is as transparent as its English equivalent: “e”. For modern speakers, this letter is pronounced as a voiced dental fricative consonant, like the in this or although. In Greek, the mouth of a river and other triangular shapes are known as “deltas”. Originally, “Delta” was supposed to represent a door. The sound of this letter is like that of “y” in yes or yacht. The word Gamma (romanization: G), like the word gimel in Semitic, means camel, as the letter is thought to look like a camel’s head. Γάμα – ΓĪlpha is not the only Greek letter that comes from the animal world. Its English counterpart is ”v”, the sounds we have in words like vase or vet. Βήτα – Bī (romanisation), which is supposed to be the representation of a two-story, has the same ancestors as “Beth”, Hebrew for “home”. As with most Greek letters, Alpha has a near English equivalent in words such as cat o man. Photo by Francisco Anzola via Flickr Άλφα – AĪ is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and it derives from an ancient Egyptian symbol for the head of a horned ox.
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