What is NT Greek?

The Alphabet

Technically, you do not need to know the names of the letters to pronounce them correctly, nor do you need to know the order of the alphabet. These are, however, useful things to know when you want to talk about Greek with others, and the name of the letter will help you to remember the sound. As a general guideline, the pronunciation of the letter will follow the first sound in the name of the letter. For example, β (Beta) starts with a “b” and makes a /b/ sound.

While there are 24 letters in the alphabet, there are more symbols outside of the letters that affect pronunciation. Any written symbol that stands for a meaning-sound pair is called a grapheme. Some of these are combinations of letters, while others are punctuation marks. In order to read Greek accurately, you need to know all the graphemes and what they do. Although we present them here so that you can see them together, that is not necessarily the best way to learn all the symbols. The graphemes are best learned gradually as you use the language. Our alphabet lessons in Biblingo, therefore, are spread out over 6 lessons, so that you can learn each set of symbols well before moving on to the next set.

Letters

The letters are presented with the lowercase letter on the left and the uppercase after the slash. Capital letters are generally not used at the beginning of every sentence in print copies of the NT today, but they are used at the start of paragraphs and for proper names. There is one final form of a letter, namely the σ, separated by a comma from its normal form. A final form looks different when it ends a word, so whereas sigma looks like σ when it is found in the beginning or middle of a word, it appears as ς when found at the end, e.g. σύ (initial), ἐστίν (medial), πρός (final).

In the third column, we give the transliteration of the Greek letters. To transliterate letters means to convert the letters from one alphabet to another. In this case, the Greek alphabet is being converted into English. You won’t see any transliteration within Biblingo itself, but some books transliterate Greek letters into English when writing in Greek, so it is helpful to be familiar with how to transliterate. Although there are different conventions for transliterating, the common convention of the Society of Biblical Literature is the only one provided in the transliteration column. Finally, the lesson column gives the lesson number where the pronunciation of the letter is learned within the app.

Table 3 (continued)

Letter combinations

Some of the above letters combine to form different sounds. Many of these are vowel letters, which are called diphthongs – a combination of two vowels that are pronounced together. A similar kind of symbol is the iota subscript, which is a small ι found under certain vowel letters. Finally, the letter γ is consistently pronounced differently when preceding certain letters.

Accents and vowel markings

Accents are found on most words in Greek, though some words, called proclitics and enclitics, are only accented in certain environments. You will learn the rules for accenting these and other words as we progress. We use α as a placeholder to represent each of the accents, but most can appear on any vowel letter. When a diphthong is accented, it appears on the second vowel, as in εί. The smooth and rough breathing marks normally appear only on the initial vowel in a word. The rough breathing mark can also appear on the ρ. The diaeresis is a symbol that tells you not to pronounce the two vowels as a diphthong. It is only found on the letters ι and υ.

Punctuation marks

There are four basic punctuation marks in NT Greek. Two of them have identical symbols and functions in English: the period (.) ends a sentence, and the comma (,) marks a short stop. Two punctuation marks either differ in form or function from their English counterparts. The raised colon (·) is a symbol not found in English, but it functions similarly to a semicolon or colon in English. The semicolon (;) is a symbol found in English, but it marks the sentence as a question in Greek, replacing the English question mark.

Pronunciation Systems

How to pronounce Greek has become a contentious issue within NT Greek pedagogy (see Kantor 2023 for a recent discussion). There are valid arguments that can be made for using different systems, so we allow you to choose your own based on your preferences. Information about each pronunciation system and considerations on why they should or should not be chosen can be found within the Biblingo app.

What is more important than your choice in pronunciation is that you commit to using your pronunciation. Speak in Greek out loud over and over again, and your understanding of Greek will be improved, no matter what pronunciation you are using. You can learn Greek adequately in any system that you choose as long as you use the language. This is an important point that should not be glossed over. Studies have shown that you are pronouncing the sounds in your mind as you read, regardless of whether you are saying anything out loud. The implication is that being more proficient at whatever pronunciation system you choose will facilitate your reading, and being a better reader of Greek will deepen your understanding of the biblical text.

In phonetics, the study of the acoustic nature of sounds, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a symbolic system that allows linguists to represent any sound that the human mouth can make with a unique symbol. For our purposes, this allows us to distinguish between the four pronunciation systems in an accurate way, as we do in the chart below. You can also easily look up the IPA symbol to learn more about how to pronounce each of the sounds in whatever system you choose.

The order that we present the sounds below is based on sound quality and not on order in the alphabet (the order of the alphabet has already been provided above). Similar sounds are presented together, so that they can be contrasted with one another. This is not the best way to learn the sounds (and it is not the order we teach them in), since learning similar sounds together can create confusion. We recommend that you learn the sounds in the order given in our lessons and you use these tables to compare the sounds, both within the same pronunciation system and between systems.

Consonants

Vowels

Table 7 (continued)