Greek Roots · letter 23 of 24

Psi

The soul — and the letter that puts a silent p at the front of “psalm.”

How the shape crossed the sea

No Phoenician parent

Greek added this letter itself, after the borrowed ones ran out. There is nothing here to draw, and no honest reconstruction to offer.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

A trident on a shaft. Greek's own, and the last consonant added.

drawn on a broken line: this letter's origin is not settled

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

The ps of “lapse,” written with one letter — and pronounced at the start of a word, which English will not do. Psalm really did begin with a p.

Written ps in scholarly books.

Its number

700

it is letter 23 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

no meaning — a Greek invention

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

no Phoenician parent

Not recovered

Psychē is the word English turns into “soul,” and it is one of the places where Greek and Hebrew think alike. Like the Hebrew nephesh, it can mean the life in a body, the person themselves, or the appetite that keeps them alive — and translators have to choose, sentence by sentence.

So when Jesus asks what a man is profited if he gains the whole world and loses his psychē, English versions split: some say “soul,” some say “life.” Both are in the word, and the sentence works either way.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

Soul, or life?

In Matthew 16 the same noun appears three times in three verses — “whoever would save his life,” “lose his life,” “gain the world and forfeit his soul.” One Greek word, and English Bibles switch horses inside the paragraph because English has no single word that covers the ground.

Why “psalm” has a silent p

Psalmos is a song played on a plucked string. Greek is perfectly happy to say ps at the start of a word; English is not, so it kept the spelling and dropped the sound. The silent p in psalm, psychology and pseudonym is a Greek letter that English cannot pronounce.

Words that begin here

ψυχή

psychē — soul, life

The Greek counterpart to Hebrew nephesh — and the same translation problem.

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ψαλμός

psalmos — psalm

A song for a plucked instrument. The book is named after the harp.

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ψεύδομαι

pseudomai — to lie

The root behind every English “pseudo-” — including “pseudonym.”

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