Greek Alphabet Cards | Hacker News Reader

Greek Alphabet Cards

labs.randomquark.com

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Funny thing, as a Greek I preferred Latin letters for math symbols, which I knew fluently, as this helped me focus easier on them among the Greek text. I believe this is one of the reasons Greek letters are used in Latin languages.

All 24 Greek letters are used as math variables, depending on the field. Eg κ, λ, μ for arithmetic, χ, ψ for equations, graphs and differential, θ, ω for probability. Someone should definitely know to handle them easily.

These cards are designed for kids, though they seem effective for adults too, as their language knowledge is similar to a small kid's. Another simple way is to print and fill pre-school charts that show repetitive large letters. It's never too late to learn Greek!

While bored in high school math class around the year 2005, I forced myself to learn the Greek alphabet. That very much came in handy in university, as Greek letters are frequently used for variables in computer science, mathematics, and physics.

Also plastered on frat and sorority houses all over town :-) (at least at many universities in the US)

The full alphabet?

You aren’t familiar with the α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ ς τ υ φ χ ψ ω sorority?

First time I see ς as part of the alphabet. Looks as if there were 25 letters.

It’s also a variant of sigma

Very handy. My math education would have gone much better if my notes weren't full of "lambda is the half stickman; sigma is upside down Q or broken E" and other really silly things

Yeah, they should mark the Greek alphabet as a mandatory prerequisite for college math. It had an unreasonable effect on how quickly I was processing notation-heavy math after learning some Greek for going on a trip over there.

As I say above, the issue is that modern Greek pronounces some letters very differently. We use the classical pronunciation in maths etc.

Modern Greek is, frankly, irrelevant.

Ancient Greek is needed to get a full Western education, for reading some of our foundational literature properly.

Why would modern Greek be "irrelevant"? Millions of Greeks and Cypriots speak the language, along with minorities in other countries and a very large and well dispersed diaspora. Greece and Cyprus are major holiday destinations for northern Europeans. There are major writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis who have used modern Greek so there are cultural reasons to. Heck, I even like some modern Greek music, and am grateful for it, since it was one of the few things which kept me happy during lockdown.

You're right in saying Classical (inc. Koine) Greek is far more influential, but modern Greek is not "frankly irrelevant".

Everything written in ancient Greek that is foundational to western literature, has already been translated, likely to a higher standard than most of the people trying to learn it.

Unless you wish to be part of an effort to further improve the quality of these translations, including to adjust them for the fact modern languages themselves are a moving target, just read those translations.

Modern Greek, on the other hand, is a living language with new art and culture coming from it. I may not be able to write "a cup of tea please" without misspelling tea, nor pronouncing it so badly they reply in English (as per my user profile), but this is infinitely more valuable than knowing if the ancient Greek character inviting people over for a meal is saying the people will eat the meal or be the meal.

To be fair, there are nuances in the ancient Greek which are best brought out by some study of the language. The most frequently translated ancient Greek text(s) would be the New Testament, and even there you can see a lot of modern churches base their ideas on dubious translations.

I find ancient Greek not so helpful when it comes to etymologies. Some are helpful, but many are obscure or misleading. Climax comes from the word for a ladder apparently, and electron comes from the word for amber. There are stories behind both but they won't get you far. Any word beginning with psych- tends to relate to the mind, but the Greek means "soul".

Sure, but to the extent that the nuances matter to modern literature, they're documented. For Church stuff in particular, the erroneous translation is more relevant to a full Western education than the truth of the source material it was based on, simply because the culture came from the error; that αἰώνιος in ancient Greek means "age-long" matters less to understanding Christianity than that the theological use is "eternal", the latter of which you can get without ever learning a single word of Ancient Greek: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/αἰώνιος

I don't mean to deny someone's fun side hobby, if anyone wishes to get into the archeology of linguistics that's obviously fine and good for them, but it's not really a useful or necessary thing for a "full" education as claimed by the quotation:

> Ancient Greek is needed to get a full Western education, for reading some of our foundational literature properly.

I wonder if the ancients complained about μονογενής the same way modern people complain about "very unique"? But again, what I question here is if this matters, I don't think knowing the answer is necessary for a "full" education.

Wow, what a way to write off something "foundational to western literature".

I studied koine Greek with my dad. Today, I study Aristotle alongside half-a-dozen English translations (the latest, Adam Beresford's Ethics, is hilarious, "like Han Solo and Chewbacca, Achilles and Patrocles" in the notes; his Aristotle uses "Perhaps...but that's a bit off-topic").

None of the English translations is as convincing as knowing the original vocabulary. Many phrases and idioms are still obscure or debated. Why should the student not want to look behind the curtain?

Finally, there is something bracing about knowing the ancient grammar. Greek has features long-vanished from English.

You would separate students into those who never need to bother looking a bit into "foundational to western literature" and those handful who are on a PhD track. Eventually, nobody would grow up to be recruited into the latter.

Greek is famously a lot more specific about what love is (especially in a New Testament context). English smooshes a lot of barely related concepts together to form its idea of "love" which encompasses care, lust, parental love, romance, charity and a number of other things.

What you call "classical pronunciation" is really at best an approximation of the ancient Greek pronunciation, but mixed heavily with English (after some frolicking around in Latin). As far as I know, this is limited to English speakers only.

For example, π is pronounced "πι", or probably closed to "pee" in modern and in ancient Greek. It's never pronounced like "pie". Same with all letters that end with "i", for example "φ,χ,ψ" (pronounced as phee, chee, psee, never rhyming with pie). T (τ) was never pronounced as "ta-oo", either, not in ancient nor modern Greek.

There are differences between modern and ancient Greek of course. For example "β" (beta), originally pronounced more like it's now in English, only with a longer "e", while in modern Greek it's more like "vita")

I'm well aware it is an approximation, but there is a traditional classical pronunciation in use as there is with Latin (or Sanskrit, Pali and classical Hebrew), which is still in use whether or not it is authentic.

You're confusing different terminology. There is a traditional pronunciation. And there's a classical pronunciation. But the traditional pronunciation is not classical.

For Latin, there's a handy wikipedia page telling you all about the difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciat... .

No I'm not. I do know the difference.

I had a native Italian professor who said "β" more like "vita". One day he tried to write "ξ" on the whiteboard and said "whatever the hell this is?". I was the only person who spoke up.

The modern academic consensus is that "η" was likely pronounced like the "e" in "met" but longer. In IPA, it'd be /e:/. And thus "β" as /be:ta/. What you are saying is how it is done in modern Greek though.

Yes, that's what I said. Beta sounded more like the English pronunciation than what modern Greek pronunciation is.

Oops, I thought your claim was about the consonant sound /b/ vs /v/. I had the British /bi:tə/ in my mind, and forgot that Americans used /beɪtə/, which I agree is closer to the American pronunciation if your 'ay's are not diphthongised.

Funny enough, I went to double-check the IPA and realized the textbook classical Attic should be reconstructed as /ɛ/, so /bɛːta/ anyway. Which is still closer to the American version as both are open front vowels.

BUT, I just went down a rabbit hole and found this video on the history of the letter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS5POB2rLsw

It turns out that while /bɛːta/ is the old academic reconstruction, statistical analyses of spelling mistakes from then shows that Athenians had already closed that vowel to /e:/ or even all the way to the modern /i:/ sound as early as 500 BC. So the how they spoke daily was even messier.

You're right, I guess American English is too common and I didn't consider that British English pronounce it differently (and one step closer to modern Greek)

Attic/Athenian Greek were considered a bit weird by other Greeks at the time, especially with replacing "ss" with "tt". But if there was nothing else to connect us modern Greeks to ancient Greeks, the constant infighting and bickering would be enough :)

Doric Greek had replaced η with α in the same time period (eg ή ταν ή επί τας which would be ή την ή επί της in other ancient Greek dialects of the time.

> For example, π is pronounced "πι", or probably close[?] to "pee" in modern and in ancient Greek.

No. In ancient Greek, π contrasts with φ. Φ is the one that indicates the sound an English speaker would hear as "p"; it's the one you would pronounce "pee". You'd hear the name of π as "bee".

> T (τ) was never pronounced as "ta-oo", either, not in ancient nor modern Greek.

That's exactly how it was pronounced in ancient Greek (modulo the same issue as π), unless you meant to indicate a disyllabic pronunciation.

I'm talking about the vowel sound, not the consonant sound. Of course φ was more like an aspirated π, that's why the letter φ is transliterated as ph (p with an aspiration mark which is the h). χ was also originally transliterated as kh, as it sounded more than an aspirated "k". I'm not sure about the consonant sound of "ψ" though. Certainly not "s" of course (the "p" in "ps" is not silent in modern Greek, and it most certainly wasn't silent in ancient Greek either).

π, φ, χ, ψ never rhymed with pie though. That was my focus there.

Regarding the "αυ" sound: Same as all the original diphthongs such as "ου", "αι", "οι" etc. sounds, the "ι", "υ" etc were mostly supplemental/modifiers to the first vowel (also υ sounded more like e.g. modern German ü or indeed modern German y Ι guess). They were indeed never disyllabic.

EDIT: I think the transformation of some diphthongs had already started by the time the Roman empire conquered Greece, so ta-oo might have been closer to the pronunciation at that time. But Roman times are not classical times, they are after the Hellenistic times which changed so much already (I think iotacisation happened during that time?).

Koine Greek started off as more like Ancient Greek pronunciation and ended up as Modern Greek pronunciation.

> Regarding the "αυ" sound: Same as all the original diphthongs such as "ου", "αι", "οι" etc. sounds, the "ι", "υ" etc were mostly supplemental/modifiers to the first vowel (also υ sounded more like e.g. modern German ü or indeed modern German y Ι guess).

> EDIT: I think the transformation of some diphthongs had already started by the time the Roman empire conquered Greece, so ta-oo might have been closer to the pronunciation at that time.

Vox Graeca says the opposite in regard to upsilon:

>> In both αυ and ευ the υ preserved its original quality as a back [u], i.e. it was not fronted to [ü] as elsewhere

https://archive.org/details/allen-vox-graeca-the-pronunciati... [page 76]

(The reason this statement isn't also applied to ου is not that the upsilon is fronted - it's that in ου, the upsilon is lost.)

Upsilon by itself began as [u] and developed into [y], but diphthongs ending in it didn't follow that development. Tau starts with the pronunciation /tau/ and stays that way.

Technically, the υ in both αυ and ευ diphthongs were approximations of the w (waw) sound. Which is a sound between oo and w. The sound still exists in isolated dialects, e.g. Tsakonic dialect which is a descendant of Doric dialect.

Obviously saying it's stayed that way is wrong on its own, since it had converted to taf as early as 500 CE, in the branch that led to modern Greek. The branch that followed Latinization and Anglicization (much later) converted the unpronounceable waw sound to plain "oo"

> Technically, the υ in both αυ and ευ diphthongs were approximations of the w (waw) sound. Which is a sound between oo and w.

What? There is no sound "between" /u/ and /w/; they are the same sound. We call that sound /u/ in the nucleus of a syllable and /w/ in the onset.

> Obviously saying it's stayed that way is wrong on its own, since it had converted to taf as early as 500 CE

Early?? You were talking about ancient Greek. Are you calling 500 AD "ancient Greek"? At that point the ancient, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods have all concluded. You can call it koine. It's the end of koine.

> What? There is no sound "between" /u/ and /w/;

Huh? "oo" is a very different sound than "w". One is a vowel, one is mostly/technically a consonant, I'd say mostly related to the modern γ/gamma sound! One is spoken with open mouth, for the other you put the back of your tongue on the roof of your mouth.

> Early?? You were talking about ancient Greek. Are you calling 500 AD "ancient Greek"? At that point the ancient, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods have all concluded. You can call it koine. It's the end of koine.

I think I might have confused CE with BCE. In my defense, I was writing on mobile. I mean 500 years *before* the birth of Christ. It was certainly taf in early medieval Greek of course, but my point was indeed that it was also taf in some Ancient Greek dialects.

I'm saying that the notion that "tau" was always and forever ta-oo (two syllables, open /u/ sound) is wrong. It might be right on the branch of pronunciation that was mixed with Latin and later English (and only AFTER it was converted for use from Latin speakers), but not in the branch that started with archaic Greek and led to modern Greek.

The fact of the matter is that there aren't two distinct languages, Ancient Greek and Modern Greek. The language evolved naturally and gradually (granted, with a very accelerated pace in the Hellinistic/Koine period). The distinction of Ancient and Modern Greek is a modern educational tool. There is a branch that led to "ta-oo" and "pie" (that's apparently only the English pronunciation), but since it's been converted to be used by Latin (and English) speakers, it's really a Latin adaptation of Greek.

> Huh? "oo" is a very different sound than "w". One is a vowel, one is mostly/technically a consonant, I'd say mostly related to the modern γ/gamma sound! One is spoken with open mouth, for the other you put the back of your tongue on the roof of your mouth.

Neither is spoken with open mouth. That would be a low vowel, something more like /a/. And neither is spoken with tongue contact to any other part of your mouth, such as the roof.

They're both spoken with the same tongue position and the same lip position, because they're the same sound. Compare wikipedia:

> The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel,[1] is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨u⟩.

So much for /u/ - it's a vowel in which the tongue is pulled close to the roof of your mouth, and back to the rear of your mouth, while your lips are rounded.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel )

What about /w/?

> The most common labiovelar consonant is the voiced approximant [w]. It is normally a labialized velar, as is its vocalic equivalent [u]. (Labialization is called rounding in vowels, and a velar place is called back).

It's a consonant that is pronounced with the same tongue position as /u/. And the same lip rounding as /u/. And it's the consonant that is the equivalent of the vowel /u/. What makes them equivalent? Well, mostly it's the fact that there are no differences.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labialized_velar_consonant )

> I mean 500 years before the birth of Christ. It was certainly taf in early medieval Greek of course, but my point was indeed that it was also taf in some Ancient Greek dialects.

Well, from the same page of Vox Graeca:

>> at a later date, which cannot certainly be determined,³ the second element (which could alternatively be analysed as a semivowel /w/: cf. p. 5) developed a fricative pronunciation [v], so that in modern Greek the value of these digraphs is [av] and [ev]

>> ³ The Jewish catacombs at Rome still indicate a diphthongal value in the 2-3 c[entury] A.D.

Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers states in a footnote that there is evidence for frication of diphthong-final upsilon having "gone through" by 150 BC. The detailed evidence for this development is given as a habit in Egypt of misspelling αυ and ευ as αου and εου; it is inferred that the "ου" must represent a consonant or at least something a bit more consonantal than an ordinary vowel. It goes on to note that "spellings with β become increasingly common in late Roman and early Byzantine documents."

( https://archive.org/details/horrocks-2/page/168/mode/2up )

A date of 500 BC definitely cannot be supported. I also found a comment on reddit stating that this change still hasn't occurred in Pontic Greek today.

---

> "pie" (that's apparently only the English pronunciation)

Yes, that's related to the Great Vowel Shift, a specific English phenomenon. You're right about "pie" for π. You're way off on "tau" for τ; pretty much every language that isn't modern Greek has it as the equivalent of /tau/. Check out the list of translations for "the letter Τ / τ in the Greek alphabet" here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tau#Translations .

As native speakers of a language that uses Cyrillic, it was a little easier for my peers and me to learn Greek letters for the math classes, since most of them come for free to people who know both Latin and Cyrillic.

But when the probability theory class started, everyone found themselves in one of two groups: those who could reliably draw "ξ", or those who instead drew some random snaky thing which probably does not even have a proper Unicode representation. I spent half an hour finally memorizing how the damn thing is actually written to move myself from the latter group to the former.

Get a decent Greek grammar book and go through the first couple chapters, even if you don’t plan to complete the book. After completing the exercises you’ll be amazed by how quickly the Greek alphabet stuck. Repeat every 10 years if necessary.

As Portuguese that was of great help, given the amount of words with Greek roots, understanding the alphabet automatically made me available several words that I already knew.

Naturally had to skill up on everything else.

The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.

For ancient Greek, two great books are:

Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.

Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce

Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.

B/V shifts or mergers are very common, notably in many Spanish variants they will, for example, write “vaca”, betraying the latin root “vacca”, but very clearly say “baca”. Coming from a language that clearly differentates between these sounds, it’s surprising how close they are.

For me the most clear example (in English and other languages that borrowed from Latin) is "to move" and "mobile".

As a fun fact, both Cyrillic letters Б б sounding "b" and В в sounding "v" were historically derived from Greek Β β.

ομφαλός (belly button) is quite weird for ο (omikron), but I can't think of something better!

Just listing the letters below and my rating for each letter, maybe someone has a better idea for some of them:

α - αχλάδι (pear) 5/5

β - βάρκα (boat) 5/5

γ - γίδα (goat) 4/5

δ - δεινόσαυρος (dinosaur) 4/5

ε - έντομο (insect, bug) 4/5

ζ - ζώνη (belt) 3/5

η - ηλιοτρόπιο (sunflower) 3/5

θ - θρόνος (throne) 4/5

ι - ιππόκαμπος (seahorse) 3/5

κ - κάκτος (cactus) 2/5

λ - λιοντάρι (lion) 4/5

μ - μάσκα (mask) 4/5

ν - νυχτερίδα (bat) 4/5

ξ - ξύλο (wood, stick of wood) 2/5

ο - ομφαλός (belly button) 1/5

π - πόρτα (door) 4/5

ρ - ρακέτα (racket) 4/5

σ - σαλιγκάρι (snail) 5/5

τ - τραπέζι (table) 5/5

υ - υποβρύχιο (submarine) 4/5

φ - φίδι (snake) 5/5

χ - χιόνι (snow) 2/5

ψ - ψάρεμα (fishing) 3/5

ω - ωκεανός (ocean) 5/5

I'm basing my rating on how common a word is, and how much the shape resembles the drawing and vice versa.

For χ - χελιδόνι (swallow) with X tail-wings is the best

Μπράβο ρε. Πόσο όμορφο

I read this whole article like you were going to teach them Ancient Greek, but now I'm guessing modern is more likely?

Anyway, some of my strongest language class memories from college are from translating parts of the Odyssey and New Testament.

Yeah these cards have modern Greek words on them.

Fascinating! I assume Mandarin is one of the other two languages your kids are learning, in which case you may be interested or have already seen Chineasy app and book, for a similar experience with Hanzi.

Very cool. With English there is Letterland which seems quite similar at a glance.

https://letterland.com/

I have similar projects in mind. How were these printed?

I wish cards like these didn't stop at ONE letter

a lot of reading skill is in connecting one letter to the next, syllable-grouped

teaching should incorporate that

There was a hilarious illustrated book "Greek to Me". It is a thorough (English) introduction to koine Greek, mainly Bible as well as classical from Herodotus, Arrian, et al.

It uses the silly-picture mnemonic approach. For instance, the verb εγειρω features a fellow raising up a suction-cup arrow with an egg stuck in it.

Present-indicative conjugations are in a picture of an omelet oozing in an oasis:

-ω -ομεν

-εις -ετε

-ει -ουσιν

I vibecoded myself a little web app to help me learn the greek letters/numbers/colours. helped me a little!

https://vibecards.blackspike.com/

no download or buy link?

Hi I made these... I just put together a small page for updates while I finalise printing/manufacturing:

https://www.randomquark.com/alphashapes

The feedback in this thread has been incredibly useful for refining some of the design.

Are there good sets out there for other languages: English, German, etc?

This is about memorizing foreign letters.

No it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.

… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.

The author is a Greek-speaking parent teaching his Greek-speaking children to read by visually pairing each letter with a Greek word that starts with that letter.

If you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.

"We live abroad in China, and Greek is one of three languages my kids are learning."

right, but giving English-speaking kids the following would help them:

- a bear that looks like B

- an orange that looks like O

- a snake that looks like S

- a tree that looks like T

(and so on; that's just what I can think of off the top of my head)

The author criticizes also English cards for not having letter shapes.

Also, "foreign" is always relative. How about an Ancient Greek referring to the barbarians who have no Greek? And, the author's using Greek while living in China.

I learned to read Devanagari by putting generic Google images cards on my phone's wall paper.

Very nice, I can borrow the idea to teach also my kids :)

Thank you :) These originally started as something I made for my own kids while trying to teach them Greek abroad.

I’ve now added a small updates/interest page linked from the original article because several people asked whether they’ll become available somewhere.

I never understood what was supposed to be so hard about Greek letters.

Nothing special, probably not even the hardest out there to learn. But that's still requiring some effort, just like learning any alphabet actually. Greek somehow kept prestigious place in academia, so it's just more likely going to show that friction in the face of those who are there to learn completely unrelated matter for which using different alphabet is superfluous.

That just reminded me I have a teach yourself devanagari by practicing book waiting for me.

Kids aren't born knowing the Roman alphabet either. These cards are for four-year olds!

During undergrad years, IFC fraternity pledges had to memorize the Greek alphabet for obvious reasons. This is how the capital letters were taught amongst bros.

  A BRA
  EZ HO
  I KAM
  NEON
  PETY
  OXY O

> However, I haven’t found any such cards for Greek characters, so I think mine are the first in Greek.

Huh? A simple web search shows many, many, many results.

I tried searching and even had Claude search in modern Greek and didn't find specifically cards with objects shaped like the letters.

Can you share what you found?

Search for Greek Flashcards.

Just did and still not seeing exactly what OP has made where the object looks like the letter. There are a few where the letters are abused to vaguely look like (use same texture) objects.

Maybe my Google foo sucks but could someone actually link what they're seeing?

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