Modern Greek/LegacyLesson 10

Lesson 10: Review of reading and pronunciation, subject pronouns, and verbs

Vowels
Greek has five vowel sounds, all vowels are pronounced nearer the English long rather than short:

Throughout this book, tables highlighted in this color have (or will eventually have) audio recordings to go with them.

As you can see from these examples, many letters in the Greek alphabet look like their counterparts in English. There are multiple spellings for some of these sounds:

Consonants
The following letters sound like the English letters they resemble:

Note: If you're a native English speaker, try to pronounce a plain τ, that is without the "h" sound in the end.

Reading practice:

Most Greek words have a stressed syllable which in words of more than one syllable is shown with an accent over the stressed vowel.

Vocabulary:

The following Greek consonants sound like familiar sounds from English, but look different from their English counterparts:

The letter sigma, σ, is written as  ς at the end of a word. Some Greek speakers pronounce the sigma sound so that it sounds half-way between s and sh.

Vocabulary and reading practice:

The following Greek consonants have sounds not found in English:

Vocabulary and reading practice:

The following combinations of letters have sounds that have to be learned:

Vocabulary and reading practice:

One of the big obstacles for an English speaker trying to learn Greek is that so few common usage words are related to English ones (although an estimated 10% to 20% of the total English vocabulary has Greek roots, most of it though of scientific/technical nature). However, sometimes there is a relationship that would help you to remember the Greek word, but the relationship isn't obvious, as with ευχαριστώ and Eucharist. When this happens, we'll note it as in the example above, with ~. This may mean that the English word is derived from the Greek one, or merely that both the English word and the Greek one come from a common root.

Names of the letters:

Personal subject pronouns
Greek has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Here are the personal subject pronouns: The second-person plural is also used as the formal form of address, even when speaking to a single person.

First conjugation
The subject pronouns are usually omitted, because the form of the verb indicates the subject. For example: There is no infinitive in modern Greek. For naming a verb, the first-person singular of the present tense is used as a generic term. For example, we refer to the verb γράφω, to write.

To summarize the conjugation of a verb, we write it in a table like this:

Γράφω is an example of a verb belonging to the first conjugation. Verbs in this conjugation can be recognized because their accent falls before the final ω.

The following verbs belong to the first conjugation:

Vocabulary:

Conjugations of some of these verbs:

The verbs έχω, to have, and είμαι, to be
Two important verbs are έχω, to have, and  είμαι, to be.  The first-conjugation verb  έχω is regular in the present tense, so it has the same endings as γράφω.

To be in English is expressed in the active voice, but the Greek είμαι is passive, and doesn't have an active form. The ending -μαι is a typical, regular ending for passive verbs. Although we won't be concerned with passive constructions until later, είμαι is so important that you need to get it under your belt right away.

Capital letters
Now that we're ready to handle complete sentences, we need capital letters. Most of the capital letters of the Greek alphabet are similar in form either to the lowercase letters, or to their counterparts in the Latin alphabet:

Sentences
The order of words in a Greek sentence is much more free than in English, but you can correctly construct a sentence using the familiar English syntax of subject+verb, or subject+verb+object. The subject is usually omitted when it is a pronoun.

Sentences:

In Greek, adjectives change their endings to agree with the gender and number of the nouns they describe (declension). The following vocabulary list introduces some nouns that happen to be neuter, and some adjectives, which are given in neuter form. The word το is the definite article, like English "the," used with singular neuter nouns.

Vocabulary:

Sentences:

Negatives are formed by placing δεν before the verb. The question mark in Greek is the semicolon.

Sentences:

Dialog:

Dialogue 1
Greeting others

Mark: Γεια σας. Anna: Kαλημέρα. Mark: Τι κάνετε; Anna: Πολύ καλά και εσείς; Mark: Πολύ καλά.

Dialogue 2
Introducing yourself

Mark: Πώς σε λέvε; Anna: Mε λέvε Άvvα.

Alphabet / Αλφάβητο
The Greek Language was one of the first written languages in all world. The script used had some peculiarities not observed today: for instance, the vowels were not written, and one needed to guess or to know their specific place inside the word. This alphabet has been evolving, through contact with other cultures and through the simple action of the time, until it became what it is today. Amongst the Greek alphabet, we can spot some (or even many) similarities with the Latin (or Roman) one. The alphabet used nowadays has 24 letters: 7 vowels and 17 consonants.

Besides the alphabet, there is also an accent ( ´ ) and a diaeresis( ¨ ). The use of these two diacritics is discussed in the next section.

Pronunciation of the Alphabet
Greek sounds are, in general, soft. As a major rule, each letter carries a single sound (this is not universal, but almost, as we'll see later in this page). As in the previous chapter, we see here a table with the various letters. This time, the columns represent not the name, but the approximate sound of the letters.

Note: The letter Γγ is the most difficult to pronounce for an English speaker: it is like a stronger h, simultaneous with the vibration of the vocal cords; in other words, it is the voiced counterpart of the χ. Before e and i vowels, it is pronounced as a y like in the word yes.

Diphthongs
Diphthongs are combinations of two vowels that function as a unique sound. Note that in Modern Greek, the word Diphthong (δίφθογγος) is also used for combination of vowels that sound like a simple vowel. There are eight diphthongs in Modern Greek. There are also some similar combinations of consonants:

Accent and Diaeresis
Most Greek words have a stressed syllable which is the syllable said with more strength: for instance, in the English words comfort and peculiarity, the stressed syllables are com and ar, respectively.

Greek marks the stressed syllable with an accent mark ( ΄ ) over the vowel. In one-syllable words, the accent is usually omitted. When the stress falls on a syllable that has a diphthong, the accent is used above the last letter of this diphthong. Thus, words like Παύλος (Paul) ou γυναίκα (woman), are correctly accented.

If the accent is put on the first vowel of a diphthong, it is not read as a diphthong but read as two independent vowels, as in the word ρολόι (watch or clock), which has three syllables, not two. On the other hand, if one wishes to separate the diphthong, but the accent falls on other syllable, the diaeresis ( ¨ ) is used, as in the word Εβραϊκός (Hebrew).

There are, however, some words that aren't stressed (usually monosyllabic grammatical words), and these don't have an accent. Words like these are read as affixes added to the main word. Examples:
 * ο (the masc.) "Ο πατέρας" (The father) is read as a single word - aw-pah-TE-ras;
 * μου (my), "Ο πατέρας μου" (My father) is also read as a single word - aw-pa-TE-raz-mu.

Every stressed word with more than one syllable carries an accent. However, there are monosyllabic words that also have accent, like ή (or) and πού (where). This accent has a double function:
 * It distinguishes words that, otherwise, would be equal - η (the fem.) and που (that, which);
 * It marks words as strong, unlike their weak comparing counterparts.