How Do You Pronounce The Letter P In Greek? | QI 

His anecdote from when he lived in Ancient Greek must have been cut for ptime

​@@VanessaMagick golf clap

Including clips in which he didn't appear.

Indeed, finally.

Giles barely says a word, Alan gets “blue whale” correct…What kind of Bizarro world is this clip from?!

Is that true or have you just quoted it to get a laugh? I mean, it IS funny, but I don’t know whether it’s true.

Population:12

There is a joke in Toronto about a police officer who came across an accident involving a streetcar colliding with a pedestrian. The officer grabbed the injured victim and dragged him half a block to Dundas. His partner asked why he was doing that. He explained that he didn't want to try to spell Roncesvalles in the report.

By jove it really exists

they have a folk festival there called "Chicken stock".

Brilliant!

@@YvonneWilson312 thank you, I’m rarely witty but I was quite proud of that one 😄

acroolis

Psay it, psay it!!

@@jphilb Wadda they psay? Wadda they psay?

I can imagine she'd be a reliable glass of white wine in the afternoon kind of person. LOVED her in Taskmaster!

​@@RickReasonnz best watercooler moment ever ;-)

I absolutely love her in every show she does. She is hilarious.

Or as my mother-in-law says: "The 'p' is silent like in 'swimming.'"

It's all in the angle of the dangle.

Why? Who cares?

That's why you never hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom...

Apparently you couldn’t hear Marilyn Monroe when she went…

Same here!

Ditto.

For the first few months I was learning Greek while living there, is mispronounced peach. (rodakino) but in Greek it looks like our P on a box of peach juice, and so I said podakino, and no one corrected me. Greeks can be mean.

@@xaviotesharris891 we can be such stinkers… It is however possible that, as the word is quite unique in its spelling, you were understood and the Greeks you spoke to just put it off as a quirk of accent, especially if the rest of the phrase was correct.

@@xaviotesharris891 Spelled like ροδακινο or Ροδακινο?

I mantain that even in languages that have done away with pronouncing it, it still "colours" the T. It's like an emphasised dental stop.

And the cheer was lacklustre

As someone who learnt Greek as a physics student, I see what you did there.

As someone who did not learn ancient Greek nor Physics, I could have told you both that there is no P in ψιλεντ.

@@sstills951 ψ is the letter Sandy was talking about. It's pronounced psi, so there is a P in it. ψιλεντ can be transliterated as Psilent. Although it doesn't work in modern Greek, it'd be Psiled.

@@andrasszabo1570 There's still no P in ψιλεντ, regardless of how it's pronounced. There's no 'F' in Philomena Cunk.

@@andrasszabo1570 They were making a joke.

And oh boy does that pter ever helico

GNU

Don't forget to tell Ptracy.

I believe the word smith is germanic origin, so no.

That was the first silent P that I thought of! The second thing was how embarrassed I would have been if I'd been on that show.

Or the Greek letter p which is pronounced like the English r

Same

Yep, letter rho, was expecting that too

@@paddotk rho looks NOTHING like a p, if you have ever had to learn to write it. it is a squiggle without a stem.

@@HotelPapa100 what do you mean by 'stem'? I double checked it but it looks exactly the same to me.

Yes, when I saw it the first thing I said was 'bira' - μπύρα - meaning 'beer'.

Right?! Surely there's loads of silent P:s. Μπύρα, μπουγάτσα, and so on.

The "ph" in English is the single letter phi Φ in Greek.

I feel the same way about how some people say ancient as ank-shint. That C is doing a lot of work

If English orthography were logical, it would be spelled filosofy, anyhow. You have the letter f, equivalent to phi, but you use it only some of the time.

As JimFC Gregg also said, Phi Φ is one letter, and Psi Ψ is another letter.

exactly, it's not silent at all, it's being pronounced as a fricative, which I believe is also how it's pronounced in Modern Greek. Saying the p in "philosophy" is silent is like saying the c in "cherish" or the c in " celery" is silent.

I love that the QI elves didn't have her answer ready for the buzzer!

They also never explained that words like philosophy and Philip don't start with the Greek letter Ππ but with Φφ

Not the first time. But I don't remember when was the first time.

I'd say that makes the mu silent, not the pi

@@paddotk Yeah I think you're right, the mu basically served to modify the pi

Yep, that's how you make a B in Greek. A D is ντ or nt. So video is βίντεο - a β is pronounced like a V. There are others - for example the letter γ is a soft g, like you get in Dutch a lot - sounds a bit like Chewbacca from star wars. Most native English speakers struggle with that one. To get a hard g, use γγ or γκ.

I don't think a digraph actually counts as a silent letter if you need both to make the sound. Like "th" contains neither a t or and h in the sound but we don't say either is silent

Anglophones typically call it mu

I know that one as; "the P is silent as in sea bathing".

I had an ancestor from Giles Who had case of the piles He couldn't sit down He walked like a clown And did so in several styles

Actually, it's Jimmy, would probably have been 'ussy... 🤣

ynis is actually a greek word too

nocraic Yes I think she would have made a better Bridget Jones.

I see what you did there. _(beeps Dixie horn)_

In German too. Psalm, Psychoanalysis, pterodactyl. We pronounce all the p‘s.

Also, "chiroptera".

In fairness, English also mangles English words with some insane pronunciations as well.

Modern Greek mangles ancient Greek too

@@neilgerace355 To the point that we 'ought to call our list of letters an alphavet.

Polyamory is wrong. It should be Multiamory or Polyphilia.

As in the book I read in Italian called "Life of Pi" and was shocked it was pronounced pi here (though to be fair I don't like Modern "literature" and didn't finish it). A bit like Nice biscuits that people pronounce Nice.

I don't know about the other Germanic languages, but German (you could argue the most Germanic language) does in fact pronounce the P in words like Psychologie.

@@kerisf No they don't, if you are German and you pronounce the P, then there's something wrong with you.

@@Aoderic You are quite confidently wrong there. In German, all those "p"s are pronounced - Pterodaktyl, Psychologie, Psalm, etc. Obviously, the "ph" still makes the "f" sound (as it was in Greek). And if you don't believe native speakers, just visit a side like Wiktionary (the German version, obviously) where you get the IPA as well as sound examples. I'd suggest "Psalm" because there it's the most obvious. Edit: While I forgot to mention, it also goes for "pn-" words. While we would usually call it "Lungenentzündung", the technical term "Pneumonie" is also pronounced with the "p".

@@DrZaius3141 I guess if you listen very carefully, to someone trying to pronounce the word "correctly" then yes, you can hear a tiny remnant of a P. I've mostly listened to people speaking fast every day German. And here Psy becomes Zü, und so weiter. It may even be a modern "Academic" tendency when modern standard German was created, to try to "correct" centuries of decayed pronunciation, and allign it closer to the perceived pronunciation of the root words. Btw. Pterodactyl is a modern constructed word, likely why so many over pronounce the P.

@@Aoderic Sorry, but you are very simply and unequivocally wrong. Take here an example of someone saying "Psychologie" very often in a colloquial register: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TrULm6v4wBY.html While the P sound might be slurred a bit sometimes or pronounced weakly, it is there. In fact, it is a common mistake for native speakers of German to pronounce it in Greek-derived words in English (such as psychology).

Nobody knows

@@danielburger1775 🐘

Silent Ss, silent Gs, silent Us, etc.

the only letter that is never silent in English is V ... unless you count covfefe

The p is pronounced in ptolemy, in greek and most non-english languages as well

Not by our tongues. In his day his name didn't have a silent initial.

"H" _is_ pronounced "aitch" ; there is no leading "h".

@@danielhooke6115 Nope. It’s pronounced “haitch”; there needs to be a /h/ sound in there somewhere, and that’s the only place that works!

@@DrWhoFanJ Allow me to quote Wikipedia: "For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /eɪtʃ/ and spelled "aitch" or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling "haitch" is often considered to be h-adding and is considered non-standard in England."

The first time I ever heard haitch was from a Welshwoman.

all those fraternity members who went to the great fountains of knowledge to drink

In Greek, the π in πνεύμων is not silent. The word is pronounced "pneúmōn."

You've missed the point. There's no P in Φ or ψ even though that's how they're transliterated into English i.e. phi and psi. It's the same as the X in English. We don't need that letter as we could use eks. We also don't need J as G can be said the same way, as in "garage" which uses both ways of pronouncing it. In fact, that's what the Italians do - they never use J.

Yes it does: π

@@bacul165 That is "pi"!

@@MichaelKingsfordGray Pi is the name of the letter, the sound is p (as in Papa...) Think of the difference between the sound w (as in Whiskey) and it's name "Double U“. There are plenty of english words with greek origin that have a p, like police...

@@bacul165 Why do you cower behind a phony name?

@@MichaelKingsfordGray Because he is right. Words in the Greek alphabet are not pronounced like they are named. E.g. the word "alphabet" is not pronounced "alpha lambda fi alpha beta (etc)". The letter which is written with "p" in Latin most certainly also exists in Greek. As the above poster says, the word "police" is Greek in origin. Pericles is another example of a Greek name that begins with "p". He was not called "Rericles" you know.