There's an interesting parallel (or perhaps "anti-parallel") in English. How long? No doubt some people were more conservative than others, but the quote from Dionysios Thrax indicates that it persisted in some quarters for a considerable time. We must imagine some transition time in which people started calling it, under the pressure of wanting to have its initial sound reflect how the letter was used. So the real question is, when did people start pronouncing the name of the letter /ɛ:ta/ rather than /hɛ:ta/? It seem difficult to believe that after adoption of the Ionic alphabet in Athens people that were used to call the letter would immediately switch to calling it - people are just not like that.
We also know that ultimately it became known as eta (ἦτα), no doubt because it no longer represented /h/ but rather /ɛ:/ (subsequently -> /e:/ -> /i(:)/), and there is always a tendency to have the initial sound of a letter name to represent sound of the letter. Since some time has gone by without anyone else supplying documentary evidence concerning the matter, I'll provide an answer based on what I think must have happened, but without any ancient quotations to back it up.įirst of all, the name of the letter Η must have been heta (ͱῆτα or hε͂τα) at the time when the letter was still being used to indicate /h/ - after all, it came from the Phoenician letter 𐤇/ḥet, and the first sound represented its value. Answers from other dialects would also be interesting, but Attic is most relevant here. I'm most interested in what the post-Eucleidian Attics called it, since they still had an /h/ phoneme, but used the letter Η as a vowel. I have heard people call Υ/υ hypsilon, so it's probably not just /h/ disappearing. However, I've never actually heard someone call the letter "heta", and it seems I'm not alone in this. Why is Ē before T pronounced without an /h/, when the name of the letter "hēta" is pronounced with one? It's because the ancients used the letter hēta for the /h/ consonant-like the Romans still do nowadays. I've also come across this quote from a scholium on Dionysius Thrax: The name clearly comes from het, and in the consonant-using dialects it would make perfect sense to call the letter heta. (EDIT: As Alex B points out, some used it for both a consonant and a vowel, like how Latin used "V".) Some Greek dialects used it as a consonant, which is how we get the English letter "H", while others used it as a vowel, which is how we get the Greek letter "Η". But I'm curious: if I went back in time and talked to Socrates, what name would he have used?īackground: historically, Η came from the Phoenician letter het (or heth), which represented a /ħ/ sound.
Nowadays, the letter Η/η is called "ita" by Greeks and "eta" by physicists.
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