4 ms·
Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I
by DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
Phi is, I believe, pronounced as a voiceless bilabial fricative, which does not exist in English. Instead, we have the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. If I remember my phonology correctly, Japanese uses the bilabial sound but in romanized text it's spelled with an f, which causes English speakers to use the labiodental sound.
Not sure why phi would be mapped to the voiceless interdental fricative ("th") though. I thought that came from theta. But I have not studied Greek, so I really don't know haha.
- jdmichal 7y agoModern Greek uses /f/ also. It was only /ɸ/ for a brief transition period. Spanish, however, uses the voiced version /β/ as an alternation for /b/, hence <Cuba> /kuβa/. (This is sometimes described as a mumble, since it's not a very common sound in Indo-European languages and people don't know how to interpret it.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek_phonology (Click through the "stop consonant" sections.)
- mcswell 7y agoFWIW, some (most? all? the one's I've heard, at any rate) Spanish dialects pronounce the letter 'f' as a voiceless bilabial fricative (I almost wrote 'phricative'). E.g. fotografia (sorry about the missing accent). The letters 'b' and the 'v' are pronounced in Spanish as voiced bilabial fricatives after a vowel, and as stops after a nasal consonant (which in that position will be pronounced as [m]), and generally in utterance-initial position.