Learn English – words pronounced with their letters reversed

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!)

I think your friend is probably correct. Queue is an example of a word that is pronounced the same way as the name of its initial letter, and while there are other examples of that, none of them are 5 letters long.

• B - be, bee
• G - gee
• J - jay
• K - 'kay
• P - pee, pea
• T - tea, tee

The other possibility would be words which have a bunch of silent letters, and an alternate spelling without those letters, but I can't think of any with 4 silent letters that happen to occur at the end. (For example, you can remove one letter from colour without changing its pronunciation.)

Edit: there's through - thru, but that removes the last two letters plus one from the middle; and though - tho, which removes three letters (and ends up with a spelling that is only acceptable in limited contexts).