Time for Pie

My daughter is taking Greek during her final semester of high school. To help her get a head start, I dusted off my old books (and even older mind) and taught her the alphabet, Alpha through Omega.

After the first day of class my daughter came home to tell me that I taught her the wrong pronunciation of several letters, including the letter most like our letter “P.” I taught her to pronounce it “pee,” while her teacher taught her to pronounce it “pie.”

I told her that I was quite sure I was right, but I would do some research on the issue. I proceeded to get online and visit numerous websites and came to the conclusion that although “pie” is the preferred pronunciation in math and science, “pee” is the preferred pronunciation in literature and theology. So I felt confident that I was correct and told her as much.

She took this information with her to the next Greek class, and because she loves to argue, argued with the teacher until he gave her the ultimatum: in this class we will only use the pronunciation “pie,” because that is the correct one. Because of his firm stance I started to question myself, maybe I did learn it wrong. So I checked with a handful of friends that have studied classical or koine Greek. Same result, “Pee” it is.

I passed this along to my daughter, but told her to be respectful, and use whatever pronunciation your teacher prefers.

A week later she was in Greek class and felt the urge to use the ladies’ room. She raised her hand and said, “Teacher, I need to go pie.” Taken back he said, “What?” She said, “I didn’t think we were allowed to say ‘pee’ in this class.” She was promptly kicked out of class for the day.