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Comment by acalzycalzy | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like how advanced math has always butchered the Greek letters

μ is pronounced Me not Mew

Everybody that I know pronounces it this way, but I could be wrong. If you could send me a bug report with evidence, I'd change it.

I have long thought about a web site that contains mathematical pronounciations. A person could click to hear a native German speaker say Entscheidungsproblem, for example. I've never seen one, although I have seen a book online along those lines (written by a blind mathematician?).

On the topic of pronunciation, say, "beta", "eta", "zeta" — is the first vowel actually pronounced as "ei" in English, instead of just "e" (as in "bed")?

"Mew" and "new" are actually a good approximation for the ancient Greek letter names: actual sound was of course "y", "i Graeca", but it's close enough, the blending of initial "j" with following "u" produces a reduced "y".

In BrE, "beta" is pronounced /bi:tə/ ("bee-ta"). In AmE, it's pronounced /beɪtə/ ("bay-ta").

I was told that some of these pronunciations have changed over time, and the English versions are an attempt to approximate the pronunciation from ~2000 years ago, because some parts of the Christian bible were written in Greek.

I don’t know much about it though.

The New Testament was originally written in Greek.

Most modern translations of the old testament are based primarily on the Septuagint translation which was also written in (Koine) Greek.

that's a joke, right?

I don't think it's meant to be a joke, but I don't think it's right either, in English.

In modern Greek, the top poster is correct, μ IS pronounced "Me" or [Mi] (spelled as μι). Here is a YouTube video of a Greek person going through the alphabet, linked to μ. [1]

However, in English this was never used, at least not recently, and its not a "mathematicians" thing. English pronunciation of Greek letters was fixed around the 16th century (see [2] for a tiny bit of history) and was an attempt to use the classical Greek pronunciations, though probably not a very successful one.

If you're going to complain about μ, then hopefully you also complain about π, which in modern Greek is pronounced like "pee," not "pie," and so would make π-day very different...

1. https://youtu.be/P85PXR6deIw?t=214

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek...

Haitch or aitch, zed or zee.

It's "AR-sh" and "zet", obviously (also, in French "i" and "j" rhyme, "ee" and "gee", it's very neat).

no, it's a yolk

> μ is pronounced Me not Mew

Ouch! I always say "Moo"...

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