I have more than one thing to say about this post (no surprise...lol). In my first snippet of time I have for a comment, let me just say that mnemonic sentences for learning the multiple spellings for various English sounds are awesome, but IMHO so much more effective if your sentence is in the approximate order of frequency for how often it is found in English words.
Sometimes I have quibbles with the sentences we were taught in the Orton-Gillingham training I took, but they are decent.
Spellings of E taught at the "basic" level: e, ee, ea, y, e-e, ie, ei, ey
Sentence: We need meat and candy for Pete and his chief weird monkey.
(i as a spelling for e is not taught at the basic level in the training I took, which is an annoyance to me, since it is relatively common - I had a whole argument with my trainer about this, but she wouldn't back down and insisted it needs to be taught only to advanced students who are ready to learn about "connective i" with suffixes...despite words of Italian and other origins with i representing long e at the end of words).
If a student is trying to decide a spelling choice for the words, they can say the sentence, write out the spellings in order of frequency, and try the spellings in that order (it works better if they have also been taught placement rules - such as e is only going to say long e by itself at the end of a syllable or short word).
WHAT DEPTHS OF KNOWLEDGE THIS COMMUNITY POSSESSES. (I hadn't even known that mnemonic sentences were a "thing" for students; I was just trying to be clever. And now I know who to turn to do these right!)
I learned ancient Greek at the University of Minnesota, where they teach the Erasmian pronunciation, like most classicists. Erasmus was a 15th century Dutch Christian humanist that wanted to pronounce the Greek he was learning, but didn't want to bother with details like meeting an actual Greek person. So he retroverted the sounds of the letters based on how loan words in Latin were pronounced. It turns out he was probably mostly right about many of the sounds depending on what stage of the Greek language one might be looking at in history. But he was already quite wrong about how the Greek language was being spoken in the 15th century Greek-speaking world. There, the process of "itticism" had already been in place for centuries. So, the following letters and diphthongs had already been assimilated to the sound "ee": η, ῃ, ει, οι, ι, υ. Erasmus should have know about at least some of this process when he pronounced a Latin word like "tyrranus" as "tee-rah-noos," the "y" being a loan letter used by Latin speakers to represent upsilon. I now speak a bit of modern Greek, the byproduct of a glossophile converting to the Greek Orthodox faith, and when I teach ancient Greek, I teach my students the modern pronunciation. I am happy to have heard that there is a trend toward teaching ancient Greek with modern pronunciation in academia, as well as biblical Hebrew being taught with modern Hebrew pronunciation. Classical Latin professors and classical academies persist in teaching the reconstructed Latin (wēni, widi, wiki) pronunciation instead of the ecclesiastical Latin (veni, vidi, viči) pronunciation, even though the latter has been spoken by people who really speak the language for unbroken centuries going back to before many of the Romance languages actually existed. Anyway, yes, you are probably right at least in part about the pronunciation of those Greek letters as a matter of history but dead wrong about their pronunciation if you intend to pronounce them now.
The presenter of this podcast also has a History of the Alphabet audiobook that contains a longer version of some of this material, but I haven't heard that yet.
My favorite "letter origin story" is how W evolved out of U (which was sometimes doubled to represent the /w/ sound, literally double-u), which helps explain words like penguin and language where the U is still making more of a /w/ sound.
My homeschool kid and I were just talking about this topic yesterday morning and I was going to go look for our copy of Ox, House, Stick (love that book!).
I have more than one thing to say about this post (no surprise...lol). In my first snippet of time I have for a comment, let me just say that mnemonic sentences for learning the multiple spellings for various English sounds are awesome, but IMHO so much more effective if your sentence is in the approximate order of frequency for how often it is found in English words.
Sometimes I have quibbles with the sentences we were taught in the Orton-Gillingham training I took, but they are decent.
Spellings of E taught at the "basic" level: e, ee, ea, y, e-e, ie, ei, ey
Sentence: We need meat and candy for Pete and his chief weird monkey.
(i as a spelling for e is not taught at the basic level in the training I took, which is an annoyance to me, since it is relatively common - I had a whole argument with my trainer about this, but she wouldn't back down and insisted it needs to be taught only to advanced students who are ready to learn about "connective i" with suffixes...despite words of Italian and other origins with i representing long e at the end of words).
If a student is trying to decide a spelling choice for the words, they can say the sentence, write out the spellings in order of frequency, and try the spellings in that order (it works better if they have also been taught placement rules - such as e is only going to say long e by itself at the end of a syllable or short word).
WHAT DEPTHS OF KNOWLEDGE THIS COMMUNITY POSSESSES. (I hadn't even known that mnemonic sentences were a "thing" for students; I was just trying to be clever. And now I know who to turn to do these right!)
Today's xkcd is about the cursive alphabet...what timing! https://xkcd.com/2912/
YES! I should have added to the pattern "the origin of cursive" and "the origin of lowercase letters".
I learned ancient Greek at the University of Minnesota, where they teach the Erasmian pronunciation, like most classicists. Erasmus was a 15th century Dutch Christian humanist that wanted to pronounce the Greek he was learning, but didn't want to bother with details like meeting an actual Greek person. So he retroverted the sounds of the letters based on how loan words in Latin were pronounced. It turns out he was probably mostly right about many of the sounds depending on what stage of the Greek language one might be looking at in history. But he was already quite wrong about how the Greek language was being spoken in the 15th century Greek-speaking world. There, the process of "itticism" had already been in place for centuries. So, the following letters and diphthongs had already been assimilated to the sound "ee": η, ῃ, ει, οι, ι, υ. Erasmus should have know about at least some of this process when he pronounced a Latin word like "tyrranus" as "tee-rah-noos," the "y" being a loan letter used by Latin speakers to represent upsilon. I now speak a bit of modern Greek, the byproduct of a glossophile converting to the Greek Orthodox faith, and when I teach ancient Greek, I teach my students the modern pronunciation. I am happy to have heard that there is a trend toward teaching ancient Greek with modern pronunciation in academia, as well as biblical Hebrew being taught with modern Hebrew pronunciation. Classical Latin professors and classical academies persist in teaching the reconstructed Latin (wēni, widi, wiki) pronunciation instead of the ecclesiastical Latin (veni, vidi, viči) pronunciation, even though the latter has been spoken by people who really speak the language for unbroken centuries going back to before many of the Romance languages actually existed. Anyway, yes, you are probably right at least in part about the pronunciation of those Greek letters as a matter of history but dead wrong about their pronunciation if you intend to pronounce them now.
There are some great History of English Podcast episodes about the history of the alphabet:
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2012/10/17/episode-13-greece-phoenicia-and-the-alphabet-2/
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2012/11/13/episode-15-etruscans-romans-and-a-modified-alphabet/
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2013/12/23/episode-36-finalizing-the-alphabet/
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2013/02/24/bonus-episode-2-history-of-the-alphabet/
The presenter of this podcast also has a History of the Alphabet audiobook that contains a longer version of some of this material, but I haven't heard that yet.
My favorite "letter origin story" is how W evolved out of U (which was sometimes doubled to represent the /w/ sound, literally double-u), which helps explain words like penguin and language where the U is still making more of a /w/ sound.
"scribal o" is another good but sometimes overused concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxJNPyMticI
My homeschool kid and I were just talking about this topic yesterday morning and I was going to go look for our copy of Ox, House, Stick (love that book!).