The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122569 Message #3652828
Posted By: GUEST
21-Aug-14 - 10:30 PM
Thread Name: Greek Alphabet. Help Needed
Subject: RE: Greek Alphabet. Help Needed
Transliterating Greek always turns out badly, because so many Greek words are spelled almost the same as English words that mean the same thing but they're usually pronounced completely differently. So you have to choose between the spelling and the pronunciation, and whichever choice you make you're depriving yourself of a lot of valuable information.
So, for example, the Greek word for biology could be translated as biologia, since beta looks like B and classical scholars pronounce it that way, and they also pronounce gamma like G even though the capital gamma looks more like an F and the lower case looks more like a Y. But if you try to replicate the pronunciation the closest thing would be violoyia, which might make you think it has something to do with bowed instruments. You could try for both with bhiologhia, following the pattern of what happens to a T when you add an H to it, but bhiologhia looks very strange and has too many letters.
The best thing would be to catalog them using the Greek letters. Are you doing it on the computer? The Unicode fonts (a couple of which come with Windows) have all the Greek letters, and in Windows you can put a language bar on your task bar, which allows you to change over to typing Greek letters in a Unicode font by just a single mouse click, and then back to English by another mouse click.
By the way, one of those references, the ibiblio.org site, has a lot of incorrect information. I didn't look at the others.