Lesson 1.2 · Getting started
The alphabet
Nothing to memorise: you can already read every letter on the page.
There is no new alphabet to learn. Words are written with the letters you already read, and each letter always makes the same sound. There are no silent letters and no words that look one way and sound another. Read exactly what you see.
The five vowels
| Letter | Sounds like | In a word |
|---|---|---|
a | a in father | agapas (love) |
e | e in met | legatō (he says) |
i | i in machine | bibliem (book) |
o | o in lot | logos (word) |
u | oo in flute | huios (son) |
Two more vowels, with a bar
Two vowels are written with a bar over the top. The bar means hold it longer, and it makes the vowel a different letter, not a decoration:
| Letter | Sounds like | In a word |
|---|---|---|
ē | a long e, as in they | hēmeras (day) |
ō | a long o, as in note | zōas (life) |
zō-, fōt-, prōt-) — and on
one verb ending you will meet in Part 4. Nowhere else. If you are
typing and cannot make the bar, write e: and
o:.The consonants
These are read exactly as you would expect in English:
b d f g
k l m n
p r s t
v x z
Four are worth a word. g is always hard, as in
go — never soft as in gem. r is
tapped or rolled, as in Spanish or Scottish English.
x says ks, as in axe. And
v is the v of van.
You will meet v in two places. It sits inside a
number of ordinary words — basilevos "king",
archierevos "chief priest", david
"David" — and it is also the letter for "ye", the plural
you: vis "ye", agapavō "ye
love". Those come in Lessons 3.4 and 4.2.
Read these aloud
logos · theos · kosmos · agapas · pneumem · christos
word · God · world · love · spirit · Christ
You have just read six words of the Bible's own vocabulary. Say them out loud once; the sounds are all there is to the alphabet.
In the Greek — which letters these stand for
Each letter above corresponds to exactly one letter of the Greek alphabet, so a Biblang spelling can always be turned back into its Greek one:
| a α | b β | g γ | d δ | e ε | z ζ |
| ē η | i ι | k κ | l λ | m μ | n ν |
| x ξ | o ο | p π | r ρ | s σ/ς | t τ |
| u υ | f φ | ō ω | |||
The bar is doing real work here: Greek has two e letters
(ε and η) and two o letters (ο and ω), and they are
different letters in different words. e and
ē, o and ō keep them apart,
so nothing is lost.
v is the one letter with no Greek letter of its own —
and it is not an invention either, because the sound was
already there. By New Testament times the u of the pairs
αυ and ευ had come to be said as a v when a vowel
followed. That is why βασιλεύς "king" is basilev-
here and Δαυίδ is david: the spelling simply writes
what the word had come to sound like. (β was drifting the same way
over the same centuries, from a b toward the v
it is in Greek today.)
Because no Greek letter is transliterated as v, the
letter was also free to take as the marker for "ye" without ever
colliding with a word.