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I've roamed the Net high and low trying to find out how other people pronounce ancient Greek. With very little success as far as convincing advice is concerned. So ....
phth
Since there are no Ancient Athenians of the Pericles era alive to show me how they pronounced:
        ὁ  φθόγγος  the sound
(as in our word di-phthong = two-sounds combined) I decided to pronounce it the English way:
  • ph = f (1 combined sound) and not p-h as in up-hill (2 separate sounds)
  • th = th (1 combined sound) and not t-h as in pot-hole (2 separate sounds)
for the simple reason that, unless someone shows me how it is done, I have no idea how to achieve any kind of fluency in uttering the above mentioned  φθόγγος as
p-h-t-h-ongos

When learning a language we've got to avail ourselves of all the help we can get. And what is better than actually hearing the words, structures and stories, not just reading them. We learn by ear as much as (if not more than) by seeing the foreign words written, to top it all, with strange-looking letters. So, as far as I'm concerned, any pronunciation we are comfortable with, be it f or p-h is just fine. It's up to us, each of us personally, to choose and get pronouncing.





 
And while we are at it, what about the letter χῖ ?
  • Some say pronounce it the German hard ch way (of Loch Ness).
  • Others say: Oh no, k-h like in block-house or -head
And I'd be tempted to agree with this last pronunciation, because we DO pronounce ch in words derived from Greek as k:
chorus, chaos, chronic, chrysanthemum (from χρυσός = gold) etc.
If it weren't for the little word οὐ :
οὐ changes to οὐκ in front of unaspirated vowels and is pronounced ouk.
Fine. For ease of pronunciation we add a k-sound at the end of οὐ .
So far, so good. But why should that simple k sound be spelt οὐχ in front of aspirated vowels but still only be pronounced ouk. It is not the k, but the following vowel that carries the h-sound, as indicated by its diacritic. There would be no need for this change from κ to χ.
Again, if Dikaiopolis came back and showed me how to pronounce oukh horate (you my friends don't see), well, then I would be convinced. And would try to imitate. But he won't, so I shan't. Because, when I try to pronounce the above k-h-h in "you don't see" it sort of automatically becomes a guttural German ch sound.

Furthermore, in modern Greek the letter χῖ is still pronounced like German ch.