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by nephihaha 35 days ago
The problem is that the ancient and modern Greek alphabets are slightly different. The ancient pronunciations map more easily on to our alphabet. I find the modern ones less intuitive e.g. beta being a V sound. There is an example below, where someone writes Bravo in modern Greek, and uses "mu beta" for the "b" sound and "beta" for the "v" sound.
3 comments

B/V shifts or mergers are very common, notably in many Spanish variants they will, for example, write “vaca”, betraying the latin root “vacca”, but very clearly say “baca”. Coming from a language that clearly differentates between these sounds, it’s surprising how close they are.
For me the most clear example (in English and other languages that borrowed from Latin) is "to move" and "mobile".
As a fun fact, both Cyrillic letters Б б sounding "b" and В в sounding "v" were historically derived from Greek Β β.
For ancient Greek, two great books are:

Greek: an Intensive Course by Hansen and Quinn.

Basics of Biblical Greek by William Mounce

Both are standard texts with solutions easily available online.