Any linguists out there who can tell me what this is called..

[RomeoLikedCapuletGirls]

I’m learning Greek and have a query. What is the 3. below called?

1. “Ah”
2. A
3. ἄλφα / alpha

1. Phoneme
2. Letter
3. ????

So what do we call 3. ? Is it a “letter name”? And why don’t we actually have written letter names in English? I mean we don’t write A is for Alpha do we? We have to resort to a phonetic alphabet or say A is for apple.

Sorry if this makes no sense.

I think it's letter name. I'd be interested in the answer to your second question too!

It does make sense

3 is either the word or the set of graphemes which make a word

They have a single unit grapheme for the sound we write with a two-letter grapheme 'ph'

English has about 44 phonemes but only 24 letters, so the correspondences of phoneme to grapheme are a considerable more complex code than in a language such as Serbo-Croat where the correspondences are pretty much one to one.

Phonics btw is the way to code/decode the phoneme/grapheme correspondences of a language, which takes as its starting point how the language sounds and the ways in which those sounds can be written

I'd have called it the phonetic name, like a=alpha
b=bravo
c=Charlie
and so on.

We use this at work (not emergency services!) and I would ask a colleague "can you use the phonetic alphabet to spell that please". Avoids mistakes as each letter has a corresponding word that does not sound anything like any of the others so it's helpful in being clear which letter is meant. No mixing up s and f on the phone if you use sierra and foxtrot.

No mixing up s and f on the phone if you use sierra and foxtrot.

Ah yes that’s what I am getting at. In English we don’t have actual words for the letter names so we have to clarify with the phonetic alphabet: Bravo, Charlie etc. I mean how would you spell the letter name of “A” for example?

Like, we don’t write out Ex, Why, Zed to represent X,Y,Z whereas in Greek they would write Alpha, Beta,Gamma etc so they do actually have letter names (which is what I shall call it thanks to PP)

And then there’s the phonemes which are notoriously messed up in English.

Thanks all