Phonological Analysis and Pronunciation of Greek words integrated in the English Language, Dr. Alexandros Papanis Democritus University of Thrace School of Polytechnics

When a foreign word is borrowed, it may not retain its original pronunciation in the adopting language. If one of its sounds already exists in English, it will probably be adopted in an accurate form; if, however, some of the sounds of the particular word are alien to the adopting language (English), each of them will be replaced by the nearest native sound. This fact explains why there are different pronunciations in some English words of Greek origin, for instance, the Greek nasal vowels are substituted by the English non-nasal vowels. Sometimes a foreign word is partly anglicized. So, the Greek word “ego” is usually pronounced in Greek with the first vowel like the English “egg” - / eg / , but in English it has changed and is pronounced in the same way as the word, say “economic”, that is, / i: gau / / i: kanomik /. Apart from the anglicizing tendency, the more recently a word has been adopted by English, the more likely it is to retain its original pronunciation, because it is affected by fewer purely English changes -changes which have been going on continuously ever since English became an independent language in the fourth or fifth century. The juxtaposition of English and Modern Greek phonemes in terms of their points and modes of articulation helps to illustrate the potential points of linguistic borrowing from Greek to English. To such an aim greatly contributes David Seaman’s work “Modern Greek and British English in Contact” where the consonantal and vowel phonemes of English and Greek are presented in detail, helping the readers to compare and contrast the two languages. 
Comparing the phonemic inventories of the two languages one may realize that there are quantitative as well as qualitative differences in the two systems: there are twice as many vowels in English compared to the Greek ones, whereas for the consonants the opposite is true. It is also worth mentioning that all language changes take place anywhere, not necessarily under the influence of other languages. At any time, in any language in contact with another there may be both inter -and- intralinguistic force. In general, when attempting to predict linguistic borrowing between English and Greek, linguists now generally agree that “the greater the number of similarities present between the foreign sound and the native phoneme in both articulation and distribution, the more difficult the mastery of a particular foreign sound or sequence of sounds will be” (Koutsoudas 1962 p.207). My experience as a native speaker of Greek would strongly corroborate that statement.