Being an engineering student, I have had to use many letters of the greek alphabet, including phi, as variables in the many equations I have had to deal with. I am also a member of a fraternity and know many people from different greek organizations and their greek letters.
I’ve noticed that there are two pronounciations of the letter phi. Every person from a fraternity or sorority pronounces it “fie”, but I have had a bunch of my professors pronounce it “fee”.
My question is what is the correct pronounciation, if there is one? Also, is this the way that the ancient Greeks pronounced this letter. Thanks
Generally speaking, neither fraternities nor math/science people pronounce the Greek letter names correctly. The ancient Greeks had their own pronunciation system, and modern Greeks pronounce them still differently.
In a way, this is to your advantage. If someone talks about a “fie”, you know he means a member of a fraternity or sorority whose name starts with phi. If someone talks about a “fee”, you know he means a character in a mathematical formular – or that he expects you to pay him.
Around these parts (engineering school with about 30 fraternities and four sororities) both get mentioned, in both contexts. Among the fraternities and sororities, only Alpha Phi uses the “fee” pronounciation. I believe that has something to do with it coming after a vowel. In all other cases (e.g. Chi Phi, my fraternity) it’s pronounced “fie”.
In class, I again usually use “fie”, but sometimes use “fee”. I always use “fee” when referring to electromagnetic flux, because I like referring to it as Phoebe (Phi sub B). Also, it was how my eleventh grade physics teacher pronounced it when I first encountered the concept.
My physics and math professor always said fie to me. I consulted 4 English dictionaries, and all of them list fie as the proper pronunciation. Not one of them lists fee as even an acceptable variant.
The letter is pronounced fee in modern Greek, but if that’s your standard you’ll have to be consistent and pronounce xi like ksee, psi like psee, and pi like pee.
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As every font freak knows, there are at least two ways to write lower-case phi, as well. I can’t reproduce them here, but there’s version one, which looks like a lower-case o with a vertical line through it, and there’s version two (less common), which looks like a lower-case p but with a loop on both sides of the “stalk” instead of just the right-hand side.
Maybe we should resolve to pronounce version one as “fie” and version two as “fee”, so as to create another pointless thing to teach in high schools.
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Does this Greek phi have any relation to the old “Fie upon thee?” Seriously.
I went to an operations research conference once where two German PhDs presented a paper and referred in passing to Chi (ryhmes with “sky”) as “Chee”. They were very, very perplexed to find that no one else (mostly Americans, but a few others from elsewhere) pronounced it that way. I would have said here that Chi is pronounced “Kai”, but that happens to be the Greek for “and”, and is pronounced like “Ke”.
I’ve heard physicists use both pronounciations. The Greek letters spelled with a terminal “i” in English are properly pronounced with an “ee” sound, but then, “pi” and “p” would sound too much alike. Of course, in the special case of “phi”, neither “fie” nor “fee” is correct: The Greek pronounciation is closer to a “p” sound followed by an “h” sound, than to an “f” sound at all.
As for the two ways to write it, the proper way is as a circle with a vertical slash, but the other way is often used as a shortcut on blackboards and such, since it’s only a single stroke. This is fine for blackboards, but I fail to see the reason why it’s used in typeset material, where either is equally easy.
On a recent “Charlie’s Angels” rerun (Angels on Campus), the angels went to college to investigate a murder. I don’t *recall whether or not they were actually joining the sorority, but the name of it was Kappa Omega Psi. Neato, huh?
*Does anyone remember any of the plots?
According to “The World’s Writing Systems” by Daniels and Bright, the classical attic pronunciation was an aspirated p, transcribed as p with a superscript h, written as /p_h/ in IPA (ASCII). But, modern greeks use /f/. The name however is said like fee, if i have the name transcription right: pheî. The dipthong according to this book is ei, pronounced as “ee” /i/
That second variant sounds an awful lot like the Cyrillic letter that corresponds to the Greek phi. (The Cyrillic alphabet bears a much closer relationship to the Greek alphabet than the Roman alphabet does.)