h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A570412

What do people think about this one? It is a chart giving the pronunciation of the modern Greek alphabet. Is it too dry a topic to form an Edited Guide Entry. I'm not sure myself, but I'll leave it up to you lot to decide.

No reason against it being in the guide that I can see.

Well, I learnt Classical Greek and I knew the pronunciations are different. Mostly the adjustments are very easy to make and are nothing to the way the language itself has changed. It has still helped me on various Greek islands, though. One thing which surprised me is that I had somehow got the impression that 'i' (iota-yotta) was pronounced closer to the 'ee' sound of eta-eeta. Maybe that's a dialect thing. Certainly I had got the impression that almost all the vowel sounds ended up as 'ee'!

I guess the reason why it suprises me is that many of the letters (chi-khee, phi-fee) have changed their pronunciation. While I understand upsilon-eepsilon because the letter itself has changed from 'u'/'y' to 'ee', I find it surprising that the others have, since they would Classically have been spelt with an iota. BTW, how is 'fee' written in Greek? Which vowel provides that 'ee'? There are so many to choose from!

Anyway, some more serious comments:

1. I'm not sure that switching the font into 'Symbol' is the best way to put the Greek letters in. It would be better to use the extended html character set. Not sure whether that would work on all browsers, but it should and should be more reliable across different platforms.

2. I would love to see the corresponding article on the Classical Greek alphabet.

I think you're right about using FONT and SYMBOL not being the best way. I believe it will not work on Unix machines. Drat! I'll have to rewrite it.

The names for the letters are transliterations into English by me of the greek names for the letters. The names you learned in school alpha, beta, gamma and so on were transliterations using classical Greek pronunciation. The Greeks themselves would always have spelt their names for the letters using the Greek letters themselves and these names have not changed. It's hard to illustrate this without being able to include Greek letters in this posting.

I've rewritten the article with symbol names instead of using the Symbol Font. It should look the same on Windows, but should work better on other operating systems.

I can only see '&alpha' '&Alpha' '&Sigmaf' '&omikron'...

BTW why is Lamda and l totally different from english?
and &Pi and p?

Apart from Greece I think people in Cyprus use Greek too, could it be? And the alphabet is used widely in science, maybe you could mention that.

Is there an alt+123 code for that, could that eventually be used?

Hell, when I said totally different from English, I meant the shape of the letter does not resemble any English letter. A lambda is an upside-down V.

What browser and operating system are you using? I tried to write it so that it would be visible to everyone, but I fear that is impossible unless I use a picture, which I'm not able to do at the moment.

Using Netscape and NT... OK now I understood that you meant the shape.

Cheerio,

HELL

Uhhh... Perhaps that classification into letters that resemble the latin ones (I'd rather say latin than English, because the leters are NOT English but latin...) and into ones that do not resemble is not so good. I cannot see the resemblance between a µ amd an m, also the greek letters are ALL a little different (except the capitals perhaps)

Having said that, Cheers again

HELL

Thanks Hell. I meant the capitals, rather than the lowercase. Most signs in Greece are written in capital letters.

I've just changed the tables slightly so that they now include the "English name" for the letter as well as the Greek pronunciation of the name. I've changed the titles of the sections to be more explanatory.

Unfortunately, I can do nothing for you if the Greek letters don't appear at all.

LATIN letters, please the English have not invented these ones...

And what about the RHO, is it a guttural R like in Hebrew or German is it a rolling R like in Spanish or Portuguese.

The "english" pronounciation of r is something totally different from anything anyone else has ever heard.

I still think that this classification should be dropped, since it is more confusing than helping... The title says "Letters that have a similar pronounciation" THEN the Pi should be included, but it does not look like the LATIN "P" we use, so you put it on the other list... I think it is confusing.

Apart from that I LIKE the article, I always wondered what the pronounciation was like when I buy some Imiglykos now I KNOW that it is "ee-mee-gh-lee-kozh" I always wondered.

Cheers, and *please* we are using LATIN letters...and ARABIC numbers.

HELL

I'm prepared to give in on this one. THey are definitely Roman letters and not English. What I was trying to say was that an English speaker could treat the A, E, I, O, M, N and Z more or less as if they were the same letters in English, while they have to be careful of the B, P, X and H because they are not what they appear. The ones that look totally foreign are not a problem, because they have to be learnt anyway.

I think that this approach makes the alphabet easier to learn, but I must have the wrong titles on the sections. I'll try again (later).

Unfortunately, there are two problems displaying these characters in Netscape:

1. Netscape doesn't support the symbolic names (&Alpha, but it does support the numeric codes (&#913.
2. Or it would if h2g2 were doing the right thing. Unfortunately, h2g2 specify the character set as iso-8859-1, which is Latin-1. To get Greek characters, you would need iso-8859-7, or (preferred) UTF-8. The fact that IE displays them correctly is just one of those examples of MS breaking the rules to benefit the consumer!

My question about chi-kee is how would the letter be spelled out in Greek? What vowel would be used? In Classical Greek, you would write it out as 'chi iota'. However, if that were the case in Modern Greek, it wouldn't be pronounced kee, but ki. So I'm interested to know how the spelling of the letters has changed.

Manolan, You're right. I just misunderstood your previous posting (it was late at night). Although some guides to Greek give the pronunciation of iota as "i as in fit", most of them say it is identical to the pronunciation of eta, so they are both "ee". I think the Greek spelling of the letters has not changed sinced classical times, so if it was chi iota in classical times, then it still is.

Perhaps I should ask Jim Lynne, the h2g2 tech guy, about Netscape and Greek letters.

That's what I thought it must be. I posted a request on the Tech feedback forum for them to switch to UTF-8, I'll let you know what happens!

BTW, strictly speaking, Unicode should be able to support Ogham! However, it may be better to treat this entry like the Ogham one and create small gifs for the time being.

The Classical Greek alphabet has additional characters (mostly defunct by the Attic period - which everyone learns) like digamma. So I still suspect that it could do with its own entry some time. I'm not volunteering, you understand!

Hell,

At your insistence, I've combined the three pronunciation tables into one big one, in Alphabetical order. I've put in a warning about B, H, P, X and Y. I've also added the info that r is trilled like in Italian or Spanish.

Is it worth changing the Α codes into tags? Will this make it any more readable in Netscape? If so, I'll do it.

Not unless h2g2 change the character set directive.

In that case, I withdraw this entry from Peer Review. If only some people are capable of seeing the Greek Letters, I don't want it as an Edited Entry.

I won't delete the article, so that those of you who are interested and can see it properly can still refer to it. When we get the ability to do pictures again, I'll draw up pictures of the letters and put them instead. Then I'll resubmit it for Peer Review.

Hey, there are people around who can do graphics (AND are allowed to put them in)! Just think of The Post, the h2g2 Arts team (if that's still the name, I mean the ones who create those official Blobs), and who knows else.

Gnomon,

I liked reading your Entry, and I'm sad to hear that the Greek letters may cause unsolvable problems on different machines. On the other hand, you are right to say that an Entry should only go to the Edited Guide if it can be read on all machines and under every OS.

Am I impudent to suggest that adding the Cyrillic letters (as used with the Russian language) would be a good idea, just for the sake of completeness? There are some strong similarities, just like the letter "B", that has developped into a spoken "V" in Greek as well as in Russian (the river Wolga is spelt with a "B" in Russian).

But maybe as you want to take this one out of the PR, these addition may no longer have any value. I really regret that the technical mishmash prevents some wonderful Entries!

Do you wnt me to have this thread taken out of the PR by The Towers? Just let me know ...

Jeremy