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This morning at church, we were reading a passage from I Corinthians. I noticed that one of the words was φθείρει. What stood out to me was that this may be hard to pronounce for most English speakers, even if they knew the sounds of each Greek letter. The transliteration of this word into English characters is "phtheirei". Can you pronounce this? We don't have any English words that begin with an "f" sound followed by a "th" sound, but you can say it if you practice. This particular verb means corrupt, ruin, destroy; lead away, seduce.
This example made me later (not during the service) think of other words with initial letters that might confound the English speaker. Try to speak the following, reading in the transliteration column, where a vowel with a bar over it makes the vowel long.
| # | Greek word | transliteration | basic meanings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | μνημονεύω | mnēmoneuō | to remember, keep in mind, think of |
| 2 | πνεῦμα | pneuma | Spirit (of God), spirit, inner life, self |
| 3 | πτύσσω | ptussō | close (a book); roll (a scroll) |
| 4 | φθόγγος | phthongos | voice; sound, tone |
| 5 | ψυχή | psuchē | self, inner life, one's inmost being |
Here are some comments on these examples.
Does this first word remind you of a word in English that you have used before that also starts with "mn"? Should I provide a trivial mnemonic for you? The fifth letter in the Greek word looks like our ordinary letter "o". In Greek, this is named "omicron", literally, "small o" since it has the short o sound. In contrast, the last letter of the Greek word is ω, while the transliteration is ō. Based on the transliteration of this letter, you might be able to guess its name: "omega", which is literally "big o". If you have seen the symbols for Alpha and Omega before, you might notice that Omega looks like Ω, because it is the upper case version. You perhaps might remember the lower case version (ω) being the symbol for angular velocity. Or, if you were really weird (like me), you might know it as the smallest infinite ordinal number for set theorists, while number theorists assign the value of the function ω(n) to be the number of distinct prime factors of n. Examples: ω(6) = 2 while ω(64) = 1.
For the second word, there are likely one or two words that the transliteration brings to mind. The first might be "pneumatic", as in a pneumatic tool, or sometimes called an air wrench. The Greek word πνεῦμα is also translated as wind (that which has been blowing in IA for months on end), though it is a secondary meaning, relative to the others listed. For English users, it is usually the "air" connection. You might also think of "pneumonia", where the lungs get water in them. What should be there? Air. This word comes from the Greek word for lung. The fourth letter in the Greek word is an upsilon (υ), but with a circumflex accent over it.
The third word is less common in the Greek New Testament, but the initial sound should likely be hard for most English speakers. The only common word (for me, at least) that starts like this is "ptarmigan". This is a type of grouse, mostly in the north. But some of you might also know "pterodactyl" as a type of pterosaur (flying reptile). Note that the third and fourth letters (σ) are the Greek letter named sigma. This is one version of the lower case; the other version is the last letter in the fourth word (ς). This last version is used when it is the terminal letter and the first version is used in all other situations. However, the upper case version is Σ, a common symbol used in fraternities and sororities.
The fourth word is just another example of the φθ initial pair that we saw at the outset. This word is only used twice in the New Testament (Rom. 10:18 and I Cor. 14:7) for a vocal sound. The most common word in the NT for voice, sound, or noise is φωνή, which transliterates to phōnē. This transliteration should look familiar; phone, phonograpah and many others. Another word for noise, roar or rumbling is η̈́χος (above the η is supposed to be the circumflex accent with a smooth breathing mark below it - not sure how to do it in html, though it is easy with LaTeX), whose transliteration is ēchos. You know words akin to this, right?
The last one, our fifth word, is a bit different in that it is only the initial letter that itself is two letters in English: ψ = ps (which is a bad mathematical sentence, but communicates efficiently). The traditional way to learn how to pronounce this Greek letter is to hear how you say the ending of the word "cups". Did you notice that the basic meanings for this word overlap, somewhat, with that of the second word, πνεῦμα. This is not a coincidence, but this is not the time or place to go into more detail. Suffice it to say that this word is the first syllable in the field named psychology, dealing with our mind.
Here are a few websites that showed me how enter in some of these characters into html:
Published 2026-01-25.
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