Does Greek have an equivalent of “ch” as in “chicken”?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-20 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

Standard Greek does not. <ch> gets transliterated as /ts/. For example, when I was in Goody’s (the Greek competitor to McDonald’s) and ordered a cheeseburger, my order was relayed as ena tsiz! . You’ll see many Turkish loanwords with /ts/ in them: every single one corresponds to a Turkish <ç>.

On the other hand, many Greek dialects do have a [tʃ] sound, as a palatalised /k/ (which is how the sound originated in English). Confronted with the street name McCutcheon, for example, my mother wrote it down in Greek as <Makakion>. Which, in Cretan dialect, would be pronounced [makatʃon].

Kazantzakis also did something like that in a letter home to his parents from Italy; but I don’t remember what his word was.

Leave a Reply

  • Subscribe to Blog via Email

  • July 2024
    M T W T F S S
    1234567
    891011121314
    15161718192021
    22232425262728
    293031  
%d bloggers like this: