Learn English – Can an acronym be pronounced as a construction of letters and words

The pronunciation of Greek letters by scientists isn't very different from the pronunciation of the Greek letters in the respective countries: American scientists pronounce them pretty much the same way the general American population does, and so on.

So your question is actually about why the English pronunciation of Greek letters, and the answer is that it is based on (but not always actually very close to) the reconstruction of the Classical Greek pronunciation by Erasmus in 1528 and by John Cheke and Thomas Smith around 1540, which were adopted in schools. This pronunciation underwent some change along with the rest of English during the Great Vowel Shift, and a re-reconstruction in the mid-19th century brought it back in line (incompletely) with Ancient Greek. The Wikipedia page on Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching has more details.

For sake of completeness, here's a (very incomplete) table showing the pronunciation in American English, British English, Ancient Greek, and Modern Greek. I've rearranged the alphabet to put sort-of rhyming letters together, but all letters are there.

[Disclaimer: Many of the entries may be terribly wrong. The American and British IPA entries are based on the article English pronunciation of Greek letters, the "pseudo-phonetic spellings" are from here and here. The Classical and Modern Greek pronunciation columns I made up, partly from Swedish Wikipedia, partly from piecing together each letter's pronunciation in this table, partly from here for Modern Greek, and partly on my own — and I don't actually know IPA.]

[Edit: This table has now been edited to correct the IPA and source Classical Greek pronunciations from the English Wikipedia.]

Notes:

• The table, especially the all-important Classical Greek pronunciation column, is incomplete; I ran out of patience.
• For the rhyming letters Beta-Zeta-Eta-Theta, the American pronunciation (-ayta) is closer to Classical Greek and the British pronunciation (-eeta) closer to Modern Greek.
• For the rhyming letters Phi-Chi-Psi-Xi (but not Pi for some reason!) there seems to be a variant (-ee) pronunciation close to modern Greek that exists only(?) in science and mathematics.

I've made this community wiki so that someone can fix the errors or complete the table (including possibly myself if I regain the patience to finish this sometime!)

From The Art of Computer Programming, volume 1, section 2.2.1 "Stacks, Queues, and Deques":

A deque ("double-ended queue") is a linear list for which all insertions and deletions (and usually all accesses) are made at the ends of the list. A deque is therefore more general than a stack or a queue; it has some properties in common with a deck of cards, and it is pronounced the same way.

It's pronounced /dɛk/, just like the word deck, as in a deck of cards.