Comment on It's amazing so many people are able to use English as a second language.

• MxM111@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • yetAnotherUser@feddit.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨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 F. Maybe the Phi symbol just looked like a P.

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