Talk:Psi (letter)

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I am curious about this section about initial P in words in ps- being habitually dropped in Latin, and consequently "most" other languages. I have never come across this idea before, in years of study. In two years of Latin, we always pronounced the P. In German class, the same. And I have seen evidence to suggest it is pronounced in many languages, perhaps most. If what is said in this article is true, I would like to know the authority behind it.

This is definitely true. In fact, I believe that English is the only European language in which ps is pronounced with a silent p. --Ivan 06:29, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I also think this article needs more information on the affricate character of the sound among the ancient Greeks. 207.118.64.102 11:53, 20 March 2006 (UTC)Skull

A few Internet sites say that in some variants of Greek, this letter was pronounced kh, like chi is in the Greek alhpabet as we know it. Is this really true?? Georgia guy 01:40, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't recall off-hand if the letter Psi specificly was used for kh, but this is entirely possible. A number of the letters of the extended Greek alphabet did not have specific, set purposes initially, and how they were used was determined regionally. Essentially, these were extra letters to be used to represent whatever sound the locals felt they needed a letter for, and they applied it accordingly. The result was that certain characters were used to represent totally different sounds in different regions. Due to Attican accession, their version of the alphabet gained currency it it is the one we now use. Since some sounds were absent in their dialect, some letters were even stricken from the original Greek alphabet. One of these was F, which represented the sound /w/, found in Primitive Greek, and in many early dialects, but absent in Attican Greek. The Etruscans imported the letter F into Italy from a Greek province that had this sound, and it was later taken by the Romans and given its modern sound value. The Romans originally used F for /w/ and FH for /f/. Later, when they started using V for /w/, they dropped the H from the FH combination. 207.118.64.102 11:53, 20 March 2006 (UTC)Skull

Why is Χ used as the letter for the polygamma function when this page states it should be a Ψ? Pmadrid 02:43, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I see a psi in the equation. 207.118.64.102 11:53, 20 March 2006 (UTC)Skull