Hacker News Reader

Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com