Koine Foundations

Koine Greek is a phonetic language. You can look at a written word and know how to pronounce it or hear a spoken word and know how to spell it. Its letters and digraphs are always pronounced the same way. English is not a phonetic language. It is ranked among the most difficult languages to learn because of its unpredictable spelling and pronunciation.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language. A grapheme is a letter or letter group that represents a single unit of sound. For example, the English phoneme (sound) \ā\ has a number of graphemes (letter groups) that represent this sound, such as the ay in say, ey in hey, ai in aid, ei in vein, and eigh in weigh. This same sound is represented in Koine Greek by just one grapheme – the letter Eta (η) <Hear It>.

You learned English with 250 graphemes, so Koine Greek with just 34 graphemes is easy by comparison!