Does anyone know of a list of minimal pairs that illustrates the sounds of each letter and diphthong in the Greek language?
I’ve wondered about this myself, and thought that it ought to be fairly straightforward to program a search to find all the minimal pairs in a corpus (e.g. strings with an edit distance of one, as a rough cut approximation).
It should work for Greek as well: if you make a list of all words, this program can compute all minimal pairs of that list.
Written in Python (3), with a Levenshtein module. Follow the link, and you'll see how to install that module.
Randall Buth's Living Koine Greek course does this to introduce the alphabet. It begins with a set of words which only have one sound, so every pair of them differs by a single sound. e.g. α, ου, αι, οι, η; and I think it does what you're asking for, but presumably it's copyright.
Yes, morphology doesn't match phonology perfectly. καινος and κενος have a Levenshtein distance of 2 but phonologically identical (in imperial/modern); then ἑνος is a 'minimal pair' with both of them phonologically, but 3 edits from καινος.
To get the result Jonathan originally set out for, one would have to first convert the words into a phonetic representation (e.g. IPA). Should accents be ignored or represented and allowed for in some way?
Does anyone have a Greek to IPA utility for any pronunciation? If so, it could be easily adapted. It would have to be sophisticated enough to understand the tricky cases of how letters are pronounced in context.
Yes, for reading or writing, I think.