Everything downstream depends on being able to sound a word out. If you cannot pronounce it, you cannot hold it in your memory, and a word you cannot hold is a word you will meet as a stranger every time. Spend two or three days here before moving on. It is the only chapter where that is true.
There are twenty-four letters and you already know several of them. Some are ours exactly, some are ours in disguise, and only a handful are genuinely new.
Three rules that trip people up
Sigma is written ς at the end of a word and σ everywhere else. Same letter, same sound: Χριστός has both — λόγος has only the final one.
Breathings. Every word starting with a vowel carries a mark. Rough (ἁ) adds an h; smooth (ἀ) adds nothing. So ἅγιος is hagios, but ἀγάπη is agapē. Initial ῥ in a Greek word always takes the rough breathing, though it is generally not sounded as an h: ῥῆμα is rhēma, near enough rēma.
Gamma nasal. γ before γ, κ, χ, ξ is pronounced n. So ἄγγελος is angelos, not aggelos — which is where our word angel comes from.
A note on pronunciation
Erasmian is how ancient Greek is read aloud in most Western classrooms. It is named after Erasmus, whose book on pronouncing Greek and Latin split the scholars of his day into Erasmians and Reuchlinians — the second party read ancient Greek the way Greek was spoken around them, which is roughly what Greeks still do today. Erasmian is a scholarly convention, not how anyone spoke in the first century. It survives because it keeps distinct sounds distinct — in modern Greek η, ι, υ, ει and οι have all collapsed into ee, which is punishing when you are trying to learn to spell. The letters’ own English names wobble a little too — upsilon is said both UP-silon and OOP-silon, and the clips here say the first. Stay with Erasmian. Nobody is going to overhear you and object.
Accents
Greek has three accents: acute (ά), grave (ὰ) and circumflex (ᾶ). By the end of the Koine period they marked stress rather than the pitch of earlier Greek, and for reading purposes they matter mostly for one reason: they distinguish otherwise identical words.
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| τίς | who? what? (interrogative) |
| τις | someone, a certain (indefinite) |
| εἰ | if |
| εἶ | you are |
| αὐτή | she — smooth breathing |
| αὕτη | this (feminine) — rough breathing, and the accent on the first syllable |
Do not memorise accent rules now. Learn the accent as part of each word's spelling, the way you learned that receive has an e before the i, and move on. The Look-alikes drill exists for exactly this list and will keep bringing it back.
Punctuation
Comma and full stop look like ours. A raised dot · does the work of our colon and semicolon, and it very often introduces speech:
καὶ λέγων· Μετανοεῖτε, ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν
"and saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." The dot after λέγων is where our editors would open a quotation mark.
And the mark that looks like a semicolon is a question mark. This catches everyone at least once:
Σὺ εἶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος ἢ ἕτερον προσδοκῶμεν;
"Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect another?" John's disciples are asking a question, and the only thing on the page that tells you so is that final mark.
The iota subscript. A small iota written under a long vowel: ᾳ, ῃ, ῳ. It is not pronounced, but it usually signals the dative case — about five times in six. The main exception is subjunctive endings, which you meet in chapter 24.
It is a silent letter and a loud grammatical clue, and it is easy to miss when you are reading quickly. Train your eye for it now.
What to watch for
The letters that will cost you time are the ones that look like English letters and are not: ρ is r, not p. η is a long e, not n. υ is u, not v. χ is the ch of loch, not x. ω is a long o, not w.
You will misread each of these at least once. That is not a sign you are doing badly; it is a sign you are reading. Tracing the letters by hand is the fastest way to stop, which is why there is a drill for it.