The Greek and Latin alphabets

The Greeks had a somewhat different alphabet from the one the Romans used, the Latin alphabet.  Actually the latter was derived from the former. The sounds of the Greek language were also somewhat different from those of the Latin language. Greek for instance had several sounds that Latin did not have, despite the fact that Latin and Greek were related Indo-European languages, which means that they descend from a common ancestor, of which we know very little, but which must have existed about 7,000 years ago.

The Greeks had letters and sounds that were equivalent to those of Latin <P>, <T>, and <C>.  They had a letter and a sound equivalent to Latin (and English) <T>, written <Τ τ> (upper and lower case respectively). The Greeks also had a letter and a sound equivalent to Latin (and English) <P>, written <Π π> (upper and lower case respectively). These ones do look a little different. And the Greeks had a letter and a sound equivalent to Latin <C> (equivalent to English <c> or <k>), written <Κ κ>. Yes, English K is not a Latin letter, but a Greek one.

As you can see, the Greek and Latin alphabets weren’t all that different after all. That is not surprising, since the Latin alphabet was derived from the Western version of the Greek alphabet to begin with, as borrowed by the Etruscans, from which the Romans eventually got it around the 7th century BCE.

But Greek also had three other letters which represented sounds similar to Latin <P>, <T>, and <C>, but not quite the same. These were, at last until 2,000 years ago, aspirated versions of the <P>, <T>, <C> sounds. This means that those sounds, which are called voiceless stop sounds, were pronounced with a puff of air upon their release. Actually English <p>, <t>, <c>/<k> typically sport such a puff of air in many cases, compared to the French, Italian or Spanish versions of these sounds.  The <p> in the English word pan has a puff of air, whereas the <p> in Spanish pan, meaning “bread” does not.  The International Phonetic Alphabet symbols for these sounds are [p^h] [t^h] and [k^h] respectively. The Greek letters for these sounds were (phi), (theta), and <Χ χ> (chi) respectively.

So, when the Romans borrowed words from Greek that had these sounds they lacked, they could have just borrowed the letters themselves, as they did in some other cases (more on this later), but instead they chose to create double letters or digraphs for them , using letters that Latin already had.  As you may have guessed, the letter combinations Romans used to transliterate these Greek letters were <ph>, <th>, and <ch>.  The letter <h>, after all, was a silent letter in Latin by the first century of our era, and thus it didn’t represent any sound, and the sound it had once represented may not have seemed all that different from the puff of air we just mentioned, so it may have seemed like an obvious choice.

The Story of ph

The story of PH is simple. You can be sure that any English word that sports a <ph> comes from Greek. That includes words such as photograph, phenomenon, and pharmacy, for example.

But rarely did English borrow one of these words directly from Greek, however. Typically the word came through Latin first. That is, the Romans borrowed a Greek word and then English borrowed it from Latin in the Late Middle Ages, either directly from written Latin sources or through Norman or Parisian French, which got the words directly from spoken Latin as transmitted through many generations of Latin speakers (and thus suffered many sound and meaning changes along the way).

As regards pronunciation, I said that Φ (phi) was an aspirated [p] ([p^h]) in Ancient Greek, but by the time of Koine Greek in the early centuries of our era, the pronunciation had changed to [f], the sound of the English <f> (<F> is a Latin letter), which is why we pronounce <ph> the same way as <f>.

So things are simple when it comes to <ph>. All such words come from Greek and the <ph> represents the Latin transliteration of Greek letter F f (phi). Things are a bit more complicated when it comes to words which contain CH or TH. In some cases the words are indeed Greek, words such as character and thermometer for example, and many more, as we saw above. But not all <ch>’s and <th>’s come from Greek, so let’s turn now to the stories of these two digraphs.