It represents the tip of the tongue placed between the front teeth in the open mouth, as when an English speaker says thin or think. The symbol for theta actually used to exist in Old English, but the symbol “th” had replaced by Norman times. However, this Greek alphabet letter is still romanised as H. Originally denoting the consonant “h” as in hot, its sound value has shifted through time to denote the sound produced by the doubling of letter e, as in bee and meet. It’s the sound that we use in English to say things like zoo and zoom. The letter “zeta”, for example, comes from the Semitic alphabet.

Ζήτα – ZĪlthough Greek is an ancient language itself, much of the Greek alphabet comes from even older languages. It’s the sounds we produce to say words like egg or met. Έψιλον – EĪs a sound, this letter is as transparent as its English equivalent: “e”. For modern speakers, this letter is pronounced as a voiced dental fricative consonant, like the in this or although. In Greek, the mouth of a river and other triangular shapes are known as “deltas”. Originally, “Delta” used to represent a door. The sound of this letter is like that of “y” in yes or yacht. The word Gamma (romanization: G), like the word gimel in Semitic, means camel, as the letter is looks like a camel’s head.

Γάμα – ΓĪlpha is not the only Greek letter that comes from the animal world. Its English counterpart is ”v”, the sounds we have in words like vase or vet. This letter, which is a representation of a two-story, has the same ancestors as “Beth”, Hebrew for “home”. Second, let us introduce you to B (romanisation). As with most Greek letters, Alpha has a near English equivalent in words such as cat o man. A is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, and it derives from an ancient Egyptian symbol for the head of a horned ox. Photo by Francisco Anzola via Flickr Άλφα – Aįirst in our list is the famous Alpha.

Greek alphabet spelled out in english