• yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    Smh just learn Ancient Greek:

    philosophy <=> φιλοσοφία <=> Phi Iota Lambda Omicron Sigma Omicron Phi Iota Alpha

    • MxM111@kbin.social
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      5 months ago

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

      • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de
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        5 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.