# Familiarity with the Greek alphabet

It seems that people fall into three categories for how they learned the Greek alphabet:
1) Math/science courses
2) General Education/history
3) Sorority/Fraternity

I know that some people may fall into more than one category, but I suppose you can tell a bit about a person by asking what they think when they hear "theta."

/observation/

Chi Meson
Homework Helper
I guess I fall into a weird category for learning the Greek alphabet: I took Greek in high school.

I like Serena
Homework Helper
What about simply learning (ancient) greek at school as a language, and then go on into a science education?

jtbell
Mentor
In the USA, few schools below university level offer Greek classes.

My best friend in high school did study Greek, but he's Greek-American, so on Saturdays he went to "Greek school" at his church.

It was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure I picked up the Greek alphabet one letter at at time, as I encountered them in my math and physics courses in high school and first couple of years of college.

i just learned to recite it by rote because i recognized it would be important. and then i became most familiar with whatever i used in courses.

I actually learned the entire alphabet from engineering AND being in a fraternity. I always had to juggle pronunciations as well, they didn't always pronounce them the same.

ideasrule
Homework Helper
I once decided, a couple of years ago, to learn the Greek alphabet and a few Greek words. Don't ask me why; I don't really know myself.

I like Serena
Homework Helper
So how about the Hebrew alphabet? Since aleph is used in math.

jhae2.718
Gold Member
All I know are $\aleph$ and $\beth$...

Does the written Greek alphabet differ between ancient and modern?

Pronunciation of the latter is no doubt lost, and I recently heard physics letter pronunciation differing surprisingly from that of the spoken language.

I like Serena
Homework Helper
Does the written Greek alphabet differ between ancient and modern?

Pronunciation of the latter is no doubt lost, and I recently heard physics letter pronunciation differing surprisingly from that of the spoken language.

I've just looked it up on (where else) wikipedia.
There is also an audio fragment there, where the alphabet is pronounced in modern Greek.

It turns out that the written Greek alphabet is unchanged (except for the diacritics, but they are not part of the alphabet).
Pronunciation is more or less the same (softer consonants), except for the vowels.
Apparently eta, iota, and upsilon are all pronounced the same now as .
And that omicron and omega are also pronounced the same as [o].

Most people probably learn Pi in elementary school before anything else Greek.

BobG