Vowel Sounds

I've always envied languages with well-defined vowel sounds. English is particularly retarded - in the traditional English pronunciation of 'Abraham', the poor 'a' has to do triple duty. Romanian at least has symbols for each of those 'a'-sounds. In Hebrew, I think 'Abraham' becomes something like 'Avra'am', where all the 'a' sounds are 'ah'. Something Shivana wrote triggered this - about his poor room-mate who insisted that 'phi' rhymed with 'flea' and not with 'fly'.

Problem is, the room-mate was right. The 'i' in Greek is indeed a sort of 'ee' sound. The last letters of the Greek alphabet should be pronounced 'fee', 'khee', 'pssee' before 'oh-megga'. In classical Greek, anyway. The reason we pronounce 'psychology' the way we do is that English tongues can't wrap themselves around the 'psuch-' part, where the 'p' is voiced and the 'u' is a bit like the French 'u' in 'tu' and a bit like the Chinese 'u' in 'yu'.

One of the best ways to learn about all this is David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, or you could try reading Steven Brust's notes on Hungarian (oops, 'Easterner').