Greek Pronunciation: φ θ χ (phi theta chi), the full history | Ancient Greek & Latin 🏺 

Do I know anything about Ancient (or Modern) Greek? No. Am I actively learning Greek or Latin? No. Am I going to spend another 45 minutes learning about the history of the pronunciation of certain letters in Greek on top of the 45 minutes about Zeta? Yes

As an Armenian, I look forward seeing a video about relationships between Greek and Armenian

Im a native greek speaker (born and raised in the suburbs of Athens) and i really like your videos where you go over ancient greek and how that language used to work. In school i didn't really care much for the ancient greek classes but i now i find it very fascinating. Also they didn't really teach us about how they were pronounced in ancient times (other than a very brief mention i believe) but i love trying to speak modern greek with an ancient greek pronunciation

What about to make a video about the forgotten and archaic Greek letters, such as Ϝϝ, Ϙϙ, Ϸϸ, Ϲϲ, Ϻϻ et cētera? Also about their sounds, its evolution and other old Greek sounds (like [j] and others).

I've lived in Greece for a while. Not only did I have to read and write Greek, I had to learn to think different. And man, there's three different ways to write the letter Sigma. But all in all I loved it. So many words that I knew all my life in my native language began making sense, in a new light. Excellent video. I'll definitely follow you. Eucharisto.

I am a native hindi speaker, so I can easily distinguish between all four combinations of (voiced/unvoiced) and (unaspirated/aspirated) variants for a given plosive out of p t and k so when you stated how difficult it is for most people out of india and china, and then continued to say that for like 5-10 minutes, I felt very special lol

With the American romanticism for all things "Spartan" have you considered doing a video about what those ancient Spartans or Doric speakers might have really sounded like compared to their Athenian counterparts? Or what any of the other ancient Greek dialects might have sounding like next to each other. I can totally see you doing the original "Red vs Blue" (Spartan vs Athenian) comedy skit. ;o)

Very interesting learning about Greek letters. I’ve casually taught myself the Russian Cyrillic alphabeta over the last couple years, and I knew it originally came from Greek, so I definitely recognized a fair portion, and from Coptic as well. Knowledge is power.

I think there are three things to keep in mind: 1) as you mentioned, the vast dialectal distinction present at the time. If we think that languages nowadays present a lot of dialects, even if there is a standardised form which is taught and learnt in school, let's take this 2000 years ago where very few could barely read and write, the dialectal heterogeneity must have been huge. 2) people from different regions travelled to different places, so maybe Latin got influenced by Greeks coming from specific parts of Greece than the ones going to Egypt. It's not too farfetched because if we look at Italian's influence on Modern Greek we'll see that most comes from Venetian, and it makes sense because Venice Republic had ties with Greece, both commercially and geographically. But a linguistic RU-vidr from the year 4000 would be wrong thinking that Italian sounded like Venetian by looking at the influence of Italian words in Greek. 3) different languages perceive(d) the same sounds differently, and had a different phonemic inventory. For example, it's possible that Latin didn't perceive the difference between /t/ and /tʰ/, thus they wrote them "t(h)" (hence nowadays "tesi" for "θέση"), whereas maybe Coptic or Armenian could very easily tell the difference and used different letters. At the same time, when Latin-speakers heard /θ/ and /ð/, they went for /f/ and /d/ much like Italians today, whereas Coptic maybe could distinguish /d/ from /ð/ and kept that difference.

Georgian differentiates between ejective consonants and aspirated ones, which was very difficult for me at the beginning to distinguish between them, great video, thanks for the effort

For a long time I was also convinced that Erasmus was plain wrong about the pronunciation of Classical Greek. True, he lacked a lot of research back then, but now I understand the phonetic reconstruction of an ancient language is far from trivial. As an amateur self-taught linguist, I didn't realise how important it is to acknowledge that ancient languages also had different dialects. Thank you for your enlightening discussions.

I love your videos!! As a native greek, I took ancient Greek classes in highschool and I really loved it. I really wish I had continued studying ancient Greek, I kind of regret it now... Anyway, thank you so much for this video 😊

Not only an extremely informative video but also equally as aesthetic. 👍

When a cousin of mine was living in Italy, she had a Greek roommate who would (jokingly, and very exaggeratedly) pronounce their landlord Carlo's name as Xãrlo (thus with a fricative chi, and for some reason a nasalised a. At least that's how my cousin imitated it, and she is usually spot on with her imitations :)

I still remember visiting a Pompeii exhibition in Tokyo a decade or so ago and seeing that linguistically-priceless "PHOENIX FELIX ET TU" advertisement and being absolutely ecstatic to have found evidence that the letter phi must surely have begun to sound like an f (at least in Pompeii, for some speakers), and "oe" starting to have its later value, as early as AD 79. Most people were at the exhibition to appreciate the art, the architecture, the glimpse at a tragedy... but I'll never forget the _startling evidence of a sound change three centuries earlier than anyone thought!_ There wasn't anything on the internet about its linguistic value back then. Luke, thank you for introducing it to learners!

Thank you for taking me on a wonderfully pedagogical journey! You had me aspirating and affricating all the way to work 😂 This is the content I never knew I needed 💕

Amazingly made video as always, thanks for sharing your research with the rest of us in such an enjoyable way :)

Making vs. may king. This is actually enlightening to me as a speaker of English as a second language. Thank you.

I, as a Hebrew speaker, always compare what you say in these videos to what I know about Hebrew. So the Hebrew letters ב,ג,ד,כ,פ,ת initially had the values of /b/,/g/,/d/,/k/,/p/,/t/ in Biblical Hebrew. During the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC they developed the secondary values of /v/,/ɣ/,/ð/,/x/,/f/,/θ/ respectively. It appears as though the changes didn't spread evenly to all dialects - so Yemenite Hebrew has all 6, Ashkenazi Hebrew has 4, and Sephardi and Modern Hebrew have 3. Mishnaic Hebrew probably had all 6, and it borrowed words from Greek, so it's interesting to see how they transliterated it in the Mishna and the Talmud, especially regarding t and k, because they can also be written with ט and ק which only stand for the /t/ and /k/ sounds, and have lost their pharyngeal values by around the 1st century. : θ vs. t: The Greek word κώθων got transliterated as קיתון with a ת, in the Mishna (2nd century), and the word διφθερα got borrowed as דפתר, also with a ת. The Greek word κοιτων got transliterated as קיטון with a ט, also in the Mishna. The word χάρτης turned into כרטיס with a כ (has two values) as χ and a ט (has one value) for the τ. x vs. k: κατηγορος > קטגור (with ק)(2nd century Mishna) φριξος > פרכס (with כ)(6th century Bereshit Raba) μαστιχάω > מוסתכין (with ק)(early 5th century Yerushalmi) (Modern Hebrew equivalent מסטיק written with ק) εικων > איקונין (with ק)(6th century Shemot Raba) καλαμαριον > קלמר (with ק)(2nd century Mishna) κοπίς > קופיס (with ק)(1st century Josephus) χι‏‏‏‏ > (Traditionally pronounced as a /x/) כי (with כ)(2nd century Mishna) Also note that some words written with a ξ in Greek got transliterated with a כ in Hebrew: ξενία > אכסניה (pronounced achsania, ch as in German)(2nd century Mishna) εξεδρα > אכסדרה (pronounced achsadra)(2nd century Mishna) It is only possible to see this distinction with /x/,/k/ and /θ/,/t/ because only those sounds have two separate letters, other pairs only have one letter so if something is written with a פ it could be both /f/ and /p/ (although they are pronounced in only one way, it is influenced by the internal rules of Aramaic and Hebrew. Despite that, some cases exist in which Greek borrowed words from Aramaic in which the Aramaic pronunciation is known and should have affected the Greek spelling: נפטא (nafta) > ναφθα עברי (Aramaic: 'ivray, Hebrew: 'ivri) > Ἑβραῖος Borrowings into Greek that have /b/,/v/ or /p/,/f/ or /k/,/x/ are more reliable, because only those distinctions have spread to all Hebrew dialects and most Aramaic dialects (those are also the only distinctions that exist in Modern Hebrew). Other such cases like Μαγδαλα coming from Aramaic מגדלא are unreliable because it is unknown how ג and ד were pronounced in the specific dialects from which the Greek word was borrowed. It should be noted that there are numerous exemptions to all of my examples. What I've written are just tendencies, not rules.

Great job, a little bit technical and difficult form me, an italian old man living in Brazil, but super interesting. Fantastic your videos of Greece and surrounding places

Συγχαρητήρια φίλε μου! Very interesting as always

thank you for all education and work.

Absolutely fascinating!!!👍🥳

"Phoenix felix et tu; wouldn't you like to be a pepper too" that caught me off guard.🤣Great and informative video! I myself, as many others here, unfortunatly don't speak latin or ancient greek (even though I work as a student assistant for the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum in Berlin). But I do have a keen interest in the subject and thoroughly enjoy your content. Also I love modern greek and I started to learn it a while ago since I worked in Greece many times.

OE and Old Frisian had the same development of palatal /g/, to the extent that palatal fricative and approximant completely merged, and original /j/ came to be written "g".

Luke, your long videos on these topics are utterly delightful and among the few long videos on RU-vid I never for a moment struggle to get through, even having at times to pause to soak in the mind-bogglingness of e.g. geminated affricates making a syllable θέσει μακρά 😲or delighting at your comment about the distinction between the consonant in German "ja" and Greek «γεια» (I've seen whole German pronunciation dictionaries get this one wrong). Btw, I'm a bilingual German-Greek linguist with extensive training in the history of Greek, phonetics more generally and a mad love for all things English. If you're interested in modern Greek or German subtitles for any of your videos or any other input, please let me know. Thanks for all you're doing! -Leo

17:35-17:40 Maybe a missed opportunity to merely mention the most famous Russian author of all times: Dostoyevski… and his first name Фёдор = _Fyodor,_ also a case of Θ adapted into Φ : *Θεόδωρος*

This is my new favorite channel and has inspired me to learn Latin! ....I am 3 weeks in :P

8:29 people can usually tell the difference between the voiceless tenuis and the voiceless aspirated stops because the tenuis stops are just heard as voiced stops. Similar enough Voiced onset timing, and English has a tendency to devoice onset voiced stops, giving you a distinction between voiceless aspirated and voiceless tenuis, instead of voiceless vs voiced. Conversely, hearing the difference between the voiceless tenuis and the voiced stops is the really confusing one. The training you mention is really just to realize when you're aspirating it unconsciously and to not do that. Hearing it is pretty simple. The hearing training would pertain to hearing actual voicing distinction of voicless tenuis and voiced as mentioned above.

Fascinating work!

Loved this video and learned so much as a Greek myself. Thank you!

Luke, I love your videos! This is great stuff, and I appreciate your effort into making this recondite content. Keep up the good work my friend.

Excellent. Thanks.

I'm really enjoying these Ancient Greek pronunciation syntheses! Here in Poland, people who are taught Erasmian pronounce φ θ χ and rough breathing as /f tx x x/, while the ones who use "reconstructed pronunciation" say /px tx kx x/. 😐 Also, while discussing the phonetic difference between voiceless and aspirate consonants, you don't mention that there are different degrees of aspiration (for instance, aspiration in English is quite strong), which may change whether someone can hear the difference or not.

Wish they tought this at greek schools as well. A lot of the times ancient pronunciation is almost completely ignored here. Εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον.

Ancient Greek phonology is very similar to that of Armenian. I am Armenian and I can distinguish between all of Ancient Greek sounds which is also fascinating as Armenian is the closest living language to Greek. Also, Ancient Greek borrowings in Armenian preserve all original phonemes.

As a native speaker of Eastern Armenian, I find this whole discussion both fascinating and amusing. Apparently, Eastern Armenian has kept the three sound categories of Ancient Greek. It seems that I would have had no problems speaking an accent-free Ancient Greek but modern Greek with its affricates is certainly a problem for many speakers of Armenian.

Fantastic and informative video!

As a Greek, it's more than heartwarming to see a foreigner get into such meticulous detail not just about an entire language, but for three letters of it! Σε συγχαίρω πραγματικά Πολυμαθή, και εύγε! Παρεμπιπτόντως, εάν είσαι αρκετά εξοικειωμένος, θα μπορούσες να ασχοληθείς και με την επιβίωση πολλών φράσεων εκ της αρχαίας ελληνικής εις την νέαν ελληνικήν. Θα ήταν αρκετά ενδιαφέρον να δούμε την άποψη σου για την χρήση αυτών, ή μάλλον, περί της ορθότητος της χρήσεως αυτών. Anyways, keep going strong with the letter pronunciation videos! OH I FORGOT: you *have* to go to Athens to ask Greeks if they can understand or even speak ancient Greek!

enjoyed every minute of this vid. khaire! 😉

I had to watch the video twice: once to follow all the information and once to enjoy the beautiful landscapes 😍

Thanks for the time-stamps :)

Ahaaa for a long time I was under the impression that ancient Greek φ was something like pf in German, and that the others also formed in a similar way. This was very helpful

EXTREMELY interesting talk about this subject that I will have to watch in parts, and sorry for spamming you with comments!

One small correction about the Russian Cyrilic. Up to the beginning of the 20th century it did distinguish between ѳ and ф. In the Russian empire the word for Marathon definitely was Мараѳон not Марафон as it is todday. But you are completely right about the sound: the Russians did pronounce the both letters as f. In Ukrainian the situation is a bit different: there is a competition between t and f as reflexes of theta. Like in efir / eter for ether or Feofan /Teofan for Theophanes

Interesting. I am coming from a small village in Greece . It used to be in antiquity Άφυτις , as found in ancient engravings . At some point it became Άθυτος and today it is called Άφυτος again. Noone ever gave me a scientific explanation why this happened during all those centuries. And your video made it clear to me now.

Oh my God, I haven’t watched your videos in a while and was NOT prepared for the new facial hair. What a trip! Looks good, though!

For Cyrillic the transition θ > ф is only true for the Russian recension of Old Church Slavonic, the Greek sound was originally written using a special letter ѳ (a medial font of Greek θ). In Bulgarian, the direct descendent of Old Church Slavonic, ѳ has always become т (cf. Теодор vs Федор).

Happy world Greek language Day!!!

Hey, right from the start your pronunciation is amazing! You sound just like a greek dude! Νιώθω πολύ όμορφα όταν βλέπω ανθρώπους από όλο τον κόσμο, να δείχνουν τέτοιο ενδιαφέρον για τη γλώσσα και τον πολιτισμό των αρχαίων Ελλήνων! Συγχαρητήρια, είσαι υπέροχος! Χαιρετίσματα απ' την Αθήνα!

I’m a Native American English speaker who grew up speaking Greek with family. My mother can pass for a native in Greece apart from some odd word choices while her younger sister (my aunt) has a clear American accent, as do I. I live in China now, and of all the aspirates ph is the one I struggle to distinguish from p (both producing and perceiving), although I have a tendency to interconvert t and d when I shouldn’t. Something this video really has me questioning now is how I realize sounds like “f”. I’ve noticed when speaking English I typically realize “f” with my teeth on the tip of my lip, while when speaking Greek my teeth are inside my lip. What I realized reading aloud through the video though is that I must also have a different oral posture or something as I also perceive a small motion of my jaw rather than lip when making the sound in Greek words. Through the video I’ve also started to notice is I think the tightness of my lip changes depending on nearby sounds and that might make the sound slightly different, thought maybe that’s just my imagination. Anyone know what I’m talking about or what any of the terms for this would be so I can look into it?

That point about which situations in English create aspiration just helped me produce the distinction way more clearly.

just at 0:43... and I know i will love this! Put my like without esitation 😋 è il genere di video che amo, alla scoperta delle lingue antiche e della loro evoluzione! Grazie

I don't know if this video is just particularly clear and understandable or if after listening to you on the subject of pronunciation, I'm finally understanding everything but I am picking up wha you're putting down.

Interestingly enough, the classical Attic aspirates used to be voiced in Pre-Proto-Greek. The distinction between voiceless and murmured consonants at the same place of articulation is even subtler than aspiration because they appear to have the same voice onset time.

in the Cypriot dialect χ becomes a /ʃ/ in certain situations and there's more changes like that

9:40 Native German speaker here. I distinctly remember pronouncing th as an aspirated t when I learned to read in kindergarten because that was how it was spelled. Or more precisely, I remember stopping doing so when I was exposed to the then-recent spelling reform (which for the most part I've always considered a massive improvement, particularly the ß rules, which I much later found out were actually undoing a change made by a standardization reform a century before, but I digress), as I was quietly embarrassed that I had apparently been wrong.

You're about to bring many Greeks with this I might be the first one Speaking of Ancient Greek, I'm sure you're about to also bring literature students or even professors as well.

8:23 I was there 5 days ago!!! That’s the Hellenic monastery of St. John Hozevàs inside a gorge, 750 metres under the sea level. It’s near the city of Jericho in Israel. Amazing place!!! 6:35 Ουχ > ουχί From that derives the Hellenic “no” which is όχι/òchi. Everyone gets confused when we explain that Yes is ναι / né No is όχι / òchi 😂

Finally! I now know how to pronounce Greek roots so I can get an A in English!

Learning Homeric along with Modern and some Koine Greek, here. I'm quite indecisive about which pronunciation to STICK with, even though I can easily shift between pronunciation systems, though this is counterproductive for me. I REALLY want to use restored classical phonology for Homeric and Attic, but also wish to use modern pronunciation for consistency with my learning of modern. I ALSO wish to use restored Koine ( a la Randall Buth) for ALL Ancient Greek, or your suggested Lucian system. Oh, well. I may as well just use modern, if at least for the sake of consistency with my study of Neo-Hellenic.

Díky!

Πρέπει να ομολογήσω ότι κουράστηκα λιγάκι προσπαθώντας να καταλάβω τις διαφορές :P Δεν πειράζει, εξάσκηση για το μυαλό

oh, on the subject of greek theta becoming cyrillic ef, we can actually use this to track whether certain words came into slavic languages directly from greek, or through other sources. for example, greek mathematika, were it to be transmitted directly from greek, would become *mafimatika in russian- but in fact the correct translation is matimatika, with a theta having converted to a T, because the russian word passed through german hands first, where greek theta was written 'th', and pronounced 't'.

One note on the Cyrillic interpretations of the Greek theta > although Russian and Ukrainian opt for the fricative "F", modern Serbian and Bulgarian have the plosive "T" (I have quickly gone through some medieval Serbian sources, but found the actual letter theta). The beta/vita and phi questions are really interesting when comparing Serbian with its medieval renditions of Greek borrowings and Croatian with classical ones via Latin. (Vizantija vs. Bizant; Josif/Stefan vs Josip/Stjepan)

As someone wanting to learn to read Coptic. I cry, thinking about how I read Greek with modern pronunciation, and don’t know where to compromise. If I retain my Greek pronunciation, I will have numerous duplicate sounds across letters in Coptic. And if I accommodate the Coptic pronunciation, I will end up having to aspirate all three Greek letters in order to remain consistent with how I see those letters.

One of your top videos so far mr Ranieri, complete, thorough, based, amazing. It set the standards up to the moon though, it's difficult to keep up, we expect very high of you from now on. PS: A glorious stache indeed.

West Flemish is infamous for not pronouncing the H and reducing the fricative G to an H. So for example the Dutch word 'hoogte' would be pronounced "oohte". It's not unusual for West Flemish people to overcompensate and write or say an H where there isn't any, just like the Romans did too apparently! P.S. the mustache looks great on you, Luke!

Very informative! Could you make a video about the letters η and ω (for example their evolution in pronounciation, or their difference to ε or ο)? That would be very cool!

Excellent video. As one born and raised in India and fluent - or semi-fluent - in quite a few Indian languages, and as one who is _also_ fluent in Italian and modern Hebrew, having lived in Italy and Israel for many years, may I suggest a few additional things to consider? I have noticed in India that the "V" sound is often pronounced either as a "V' as in "Victor" sound or like a "W" as in "William" sound, _depending on the word._ And consider the fact that in Tuscany, the word "carne" is pronounced almost, though admittedly not _quite,_ like "harne": something that's not done in "proper" Italian or in other parts of Italy, especially in the north of the country. Could that sort of thing not have been the case in ancient Greek too? After all, languages start off as _spoken_ long before they are _written,_ and if slight variations of sound exist in a given language which do not have _exact_ written symbols to represent them, people just adapt, and use the written form which is _as close as possible_ to the spoken sound, don't they? Indian languages certainly have done this with regard to Arabic and Persian words which entered Indian languages after the rise of Islam, and which have now become standard words in several Indian languages, albeit written, in most cases, using the Devanagari writing system, or a variant thereof (Sindhi being a bit of an exception). I might suggest that both the "ph" and "f" sounds existed _simultaneously_ in ancient Greek, at least in certain times and places, as the "Phoenix felix et tu" reference seems to indicate. Likewise there may well have been cases of both "khronos" and "ḥronos" (in the spoken language) existing simultaneously and even in the same locality in ancient Greece. I notice that when Westerners who come to India learn Indian languages in order to interact more closely with rural Indians, they, especially when speaking languages like Marathi, tend to use affricates rather than aspirates, and yet they are easily understood by _all_ Maharashtrians. Could not that also have been the case in ancient Greece? And when we Parsis speak our peculiar yiddish-like version of Gujarati (and you may well be aware that there are a _great_ many similarities between Parsi Gujarati and Yiddish, especially when contrasting the former to _"shudh"_ or pure Gujarati and the latter to both German and Hebrew!), we are _easily_ understood by _"shudh"_ Gujarati speakers, though admittedly they do make fun of our ways of speaking (as I am pretty sure Germans do of Yiddish speakers, though probably not openly now after the Hitler era, which may come across as racist). Just some thoughts for your consideration, no more.

I like the map used for the thumbnail!

on Rosetta stone, the Greek names with a "Ph" such as Philippos are also written PH in hieroglyphs with the stool+shelter characters instead of the F horned adder.

As a geek it's very strange for me to learn the classical pronunciation. We were taught classical Greek in school but it was always pronounced like modern greek and nobody told us people spoke differently back then

Fascinante....❤

41:41 by this, do you mean that [θe:ka] and [xaɾta] were also used in Latin? Also, I'd like to add that for me, the [kʰ] allophone of /k/ is sometimes affricated [k͡xʰ], so this may contribute to the problem at 32:21.

Also, my problem: I can totally hear the difference, but when I try to actually speak, it becomes p-hh with a super exaggerated aspirate (possibly to the point of becoming an ejective plosive). So I just stick with fricatives. I've always been told, consistency is way more important when studying classical languages.

I think it's actually fine to try the best with what you've already got with respect to your native/L2 phonemes and only add or change things if you feel really comfortable doing so. For example hungarian doesn't have θ δ χ γ as fricatives akin to modern greek so we pronounce them as aspirated plosives. On the other hand we do possess the f sound, so we inconsistently pronounce the former letters as aspirated plosives but Φ as a fricative f, even though it is entirely within the possibilites of hungarian phonology to make an aspirated p. So in this case, I only need to change one sound to correct it in the direction of the ancient pronunciation but I would have to change way more sounds to make it sound like the modern greek. In other languages the case may be the opposite, therefore my introductory statement.

My final individual comment (sorry!): Will there be a video about ήτα anytime soon?

I see you using the centralized e̞ and o̞ for Latin; is that your current hypothesis on the exact qualities they are? I had previously myself wondered about those very qualities, but I hadn't see them mentioned anywhere else as a possibility.

By the way, in Cyrillic Ф and Х are always fricative, В is fricative as well (the corresponding stop uses a derived letter Б), Д (from Δ) is always a stop (!), Г can be either stop or fricative in different languages (Ukrainian and early Belarussian even use two varieties of this letter, Г and Ґ, for fricative and stop sounds). Early Cyrillic also had a Θ-like letter, also a fricative, later it merged with Ф and remained in several words until 1917.

The dialect theory holds water, as even modern Greek dialects have different sounds. Especially the ones that carried over from antiquity.

23:19 funny how depending on context and era, Greek words can either show aspirate assimilation or dissimilation, which is the opposite effect 😂

Great work. Incidentally I use fricatives because i'm lazy

1. It is not for the first time I see that initial zealous position becomes a much more nuanced and compromised one through growing up in the topic. It happen in many areas of expertise for me as well. 2. I was taught (or rather I learned myself trough the books as I never have a teacher in Ancient Greek and Latin) the Erasmian system with change to `th` as `t`, as there is no proper `th` fricative sound in Russian. However, exactly the studying of Ancient Greek taught me how to pronounce "th" in English, as in the school years it was traditionally taught it as between teeth "s" what is kind of very inconvenient movemently for me and many other and they stop to distinguish between "s" an "th". The clear reference in the books about the system of similarity of the 9 letters ("β", "δ", "γ", "π", "τ", "κ", "φ", "θ", "χ" ) guided me at first that this is simplification in Russian pedagogy for Erasmian, as well as I was able to finally pronounce "th" as fricative "t" (what perhaps is not true common pronunciation in English, but much better than merger between "th" and "s"). 3. In two my native languages (Belarusian and Russian) the г despite being same letter in Cyrillic are different: Russian has plosive sound and Belarusian has fricative (Ukrainian also is fricative but is additionally in different in place, it is not velar but rather uvular). There are words in each languages using different to common variant (in Russian it is "Бог" (which leads to "почить в Бозе" the expression properly, but not very often used, where the modern speakers of Russian lost almost entirely connection to Nominativ "Бог") in Belarusian words loaned from german like "гузік" and "ганак"), but they are not marked in script (usually, however in Ukrainian and Belarus "ґ" is starting used more and more often for plosive sound) , so people start to lose distinction. Me interesting in linguistic a lot now hear clear difference between fricative and plosive "г", however, I can attest it is still no so distinctive acoustically as "к" and "х" (voiceless variant of the same sounds). Which leads me to the question: how do real acoustic difference influence the evolution of languages? Because in the linguistic we so often focussed on human and its adaptable perception that sometimes we forget about the real physical characteristics. Like we are taught that proof of phonemic difference is minimal pair, which logically leads us that "і" and "ы" sounds are just allophone of the same sound (which functionally is so), however, even non-native speaker hears the essential difference between them produced by native-speaker (despite for them it is very difficult to reproduce it). Could it be that this acoustical similarity leads to "th" and "f" merger so often appears, and you have mentioned in your video? 4. I think we disregard too often difference in dialects, because as we taught this way: like it was PIE and it split to satem and centum langauges, from which branched families and langauges modern to us. However, very probably neither PIE nor any stage of its evolution were big enough uniform glosses. 5. I attest on usage of German in Berlin, that for dialects it is also additional force for evolution and interaction. Namely it is function as identity, which leads up to "artificial" use of dialect: I mean when some real feature of dialect subtract is applied to literature norm to produce "dialectal" form. So it is more like langauge game. I have heard very often people saying "Juten Tach" for special effect reason, despite their normal Berlin dialect was much more subtle and closer to Hochdeutsch. I'm curious with so high intensity of communication and travel inside Roman Empire could such tendency in underscored dialect also existed, leading language evolution processes as well.

As a native speaker of an H-deleting dialect of Dutch, aspiration was indeed something that didnt kome natural to me, hence indeed in school I did indeed pronounce these letters as affricates, and occasionally fricatives (except theta, which I sometimes merged with T). You did come to the same conclusion as me concerning dialectical variation. Ecuadorian Kichwa shows similar variation concerning the original p and ph sounds. In the north they are p and f, in the centre they remained p and ph, and in the south they have merged to p. BTW something interesiting I noted when learning greek, was one author (forgot who) writing Sappho as Sapro, which tells me either one or both of the following: he spoke with a French R, or he tried to write down an aspirated sound that he himself does not use

Very nice video, I appreciate all the linguistic details. For the word "Τραγιάνος", how do we know that the [i] is replaced by the fricated glide [ʝ]? We would expect that [ɣ] would be palatalized before the front vowel [i] so the output could also have been [tɾaʝi'ɐnos]. Although in running speech I could see hiatus resolution in favor of the pronunciation you put in the video, whereby the [i] trigger is absorbed into the glide.

Just wanted to say I love your videos, even if I already know everything you say (or am to ignorant to even understand what you are talking about xD ). I'm really glad I live in an age when all of this is available basically for free to basically anyone. Also, what I see 99% of videos on phonological topics miss - aspiration is not binary, the difference between an aspirated and unaspirated sound is a purely theoretical concept. For me, a native Polish speaker, even the English p, t, k would be considered aspirated compared to my pronunciation of Polish (or Latin) plosives but they are still nowhere near as aspirated as some Hindi stops

since hindi has a 4-way stop contrast, I'd argue an even better living-language model than Hindi for the greek stop systems would be Eastern Armenian, since it has basically the same 3-way stop contrast for velar, alveolar, and labial consonants as ancient greek. the same goes for many other languages of the caucasus, though I should note that in many of those languages, including some dialects of eastern armenian, the voiceless unaspirated series is also ejective. I'm sure Luke knows this bc he mentions armenian and georgian orthography. I'm sure he used hindi as an example because it's more widely spoken but I wanted to add this for anyone interested in modern languages with similar contrasts.

❤ ΑΠΟ ΑΘΗΝΑ ΧΑΙΡΕΤΙΣΜΑΤΑ !!! ... ΘΕΟΣ,ΘΕΑΤΡΟ ,ΘΩΠΕΥΩ, >ΔΕΟΣ,ΔΑΙΜΩΝ,ΔΙΑΒΟΛΟΣ,ΔΙΚΑΙΟΝ.>ΨΑΡΙ,ΨΗΝΩ,ΨΑΧΝΩ,ΨΕΥΔΟΣ ? THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR NICE WORK IN THE GREEK LANGUAGE !!! ΘΆΥΜΑΖΟΜΕ ΤΙΣ ΤΟΣΟ ΒΑΘΕΙΕΣ ΓΛΩΣΙΚΕΣ ΓΝΩΣΕΙΣ ΠΟΥ ΜΑΣ ΠΡΟΣΦΕΡΕΤΕ !!! ΣΥΓΧΑΡΗΤΗΡΙΑ !!!

What's interesting for me that in old borrowings into Ukrainian Φ was transformed to /p/ like in Φίλλιπος → Филлипъ → Пилип, but in most later borrowings it became a /xʷ/ sound: Εύφημος → Ѥѵфимꙏ → Юхим, φόρμα → форма → хворма. For the most times Φ and Θ were mixed and pronounced the same way, so we have: Θεόδωρος → Ѳєодорꙏ → Федорꙏ → Хведір, but after so-called Second South-Slavic affection a lot of books were taken from Bulgaria and Serbiа, where Ѳ was pronounced like T, authors of Ukrainian grammars mixed two ways of pronunciation Θ and created a new one - /xt/: Μεθόδιος → Мєѳодїи → Мефодий + Методїй → Мехтодій. And even the name of the Greek letter Θθ and it's Slavic analogue Ѳѳ - θήτα had two ways of pronunciation: фита→хвита and тита+хвита→хтита.

can't laconians have evolved tʰ>tˢ like english and danish? iirc modern tsakonian has /s/ for ancient theta, not /θ/ so i don't think it initially had it

I noticed this when I was studying koine. The pluperfect on deduplicated the the first letter of the verb. And, oddly enough, φ were deduplicated as π, χ as κ, and θ as τ.

Great video Luke I personally prefer the classical Attic pronunciation because it has just one spelling for one sound and I found it really beautiful. I’d love to see a video about the pitch accent.

It's interesting. In German the evolution of the /pf/ started withe certain aspirated p sounds. Aphel, pherd etc.

a discussion of Ancient Macedonian could have been useful as well. Whilst its status (either a divergent Greek dialect, or a separate but closely related language) isn't certain, it (at least in the ancient wordlists and personal names, but not in certain inscriptions like the Pella curse tablet which appears to be reasonably typical Northwestern Doric) generally uses beta, delta, and gamma for typical Greek phi, theta, and chi this was originally interpreted as evidence of a deaspiration of the PIE voiced aspirates, retaining their voicing, as in Phrygian (where Greek instead devoiced them retaining their aspiration), but is now more typically believed to be an attempt by non-Macedonian speakers to render fricatives (likely voiced, at least allophonically in certain positions), which could explain why this shift doesn't appear in the actual inscriptions we have for the most part, as these speakers would simply consider it a perfectly normal phi/theta/chi and write it as such, whilst other Greeks would substitute the letter they considered closest given the evidence of a spirantised theta in Lakedaemonian Doric, I wonder if spirantisation of the aspirates might have been a broader Doric shift. If so, this could explain the dominance in the West (which was largely Doric, especially after the Pyrrhic wars bringing Epirote Doric over), whilst Asia Minor was largely Ionic & Aeolic, with the Greek of the greater Hellenistic world coming from an Attic-educated elite

An interesting point in modern greek is the reserved form of the d sound of delta and not the fricative that is accompanied with the appropriate change in spelling. for example the word ανήρ του ανδρός τον άνδρα is mainly in its coloqial form written άντρας and pronounced andras or adras. Where ντ indicates the sound d. also the word Δενδρον is now δέντρο. in the last case we see the non fricative form maintained in the middle of the word but not in the beggining. These for me as a non-expert is similar to how the v and b sounds in spanish some time are indicated by b and v respectiveley, like vamos and bailar, compare these with volver and bueno. another interesting fact is the word βαινω and the word μπαινω. with μπ indicating the b sound whereas β the v sound. however these to words are the same have now a slightly different meaning but they are the same word one with reserved spelling but not pronunciation and the other with reserved pronunciation but not spelling

Every person in order to call himself civilized should know one of the two Roman languages (Greek and Latin). I am fortunate to have a good level in both.

There's a really rather lovely parallel in modern Welsh. The voiceless stops (p, t, c /k/) are all aspirated (with a really rather annoying inconsistency with only t), but under aspirate mutation (treiglad llaes "flowing mutation" < Latin laxus; in actuality spirantisation) they become ph /f/, th /θ/, ch /χ/. This is the only place ph occurs in the language; /f/ is normally written as ff, even in loanwords with Greek origins, e.g. ffotograffydd /ˌfɔtɔˈɡrafɨ̞ð/ "photographer". When /θ/ and /χ/ occur elsewhere, they're still written as th and ch, e.g. peth /peːθ/ "thing", chwech /χweːχ~ʍeːχ/ "six". I'm not really sure why this is - /f/ is the only sound in the language that's written two different ways (well, not really, but there are good reasons for the others). I suppose it could be to help with recognising lemma forms; 'ffen' is much harder to recognise as a form of 'pen' than 'phen' is.

I feel very proud of the Hindi, since it is evident that its pronunciation has remained the same, although ph has become fricative now. They never taught us the alphabets are divided based on pronunciation, the children had to blindly memorize all of them. The only drawback is that it's not alphabetical hence writing is difficult and still we cant write it on phone, but Greek can be easily written which compromise with the pronunciation alteration.

I discovered 4 allophones for the letter χ and Greeks don't even notice this!!!