The alphabet is less foreign than it looks
The Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters and is the ancestor of both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets. Several letters are already familiar to anyone who has met them in maths or science.
A handful behave unexpectedly for an English reader, and certain letter pairs combine into one sound. Learning those pairs is most of the work.
- Start with the letters you already recognise, then learn the pairs.
- Do not sound out a pair as two separate letters.
The accent does you a favour
Since the writing reform of the early 1980s, Modern Greek uses a single accent mark, printed on the stressed syllable of every word of more than one syllable.
That is unusually generous. A parent who does not speak Greek can read a word aloud with the stress in the right place simply by following the mark.
- Always put the emphasis where the mark is.
- Getting the stress right does more for being understood than getting every vowel right.
Modern, not ancient
The Greek of a picture book is Modern Greek, which sounds noticeably different from the Ancient Greek pronunciation taught in English-speaking schools.
Everyday Greek settled into its current standard form during the twentieth century, replacing an older formal written variety. Greek in Cyprus also has its own distinct spoken form.
- Do not use a classics-class pronunciation. It will not sound like the family.
- If your family is Cypriot, expect real differences from the printed word.
Reading together
Greek nouns carry gender and change endings, so the same word appears in more than one shape. At two, that is absorbed from repeated phrases rather than explained.
Point at the picture, name it in Greek, then read the English. Let the Greek be the first label the child hears.
- Read the article together with the noun.
- Ask a relative to record six words, and copy the recording, not the spelling.
