• MxM111@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    7 months ago

    So, phi should be a single letter, right? It is single letter in Greek and other languages.

    • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Uh I had to quickly look at Wikipedia but apparently the reason it’s transcribed with Ph is:

      At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi ‘Φ’ then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /ph/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.)

      And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which the Greeks did not have.

      So Greeks pronounced Phi differently from F and somehow someone decided that it should be transcribed as Ph because it sounded different from the transcriber’s sound of F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.