“There isn’t one way of saying Omicron.” Even before the pandemic, linguists couldn’t agree on what ancient Greek sounded like. They do agree on one thing: Some pronunciations are definitely wrong.
Listening to news of the latest Covid variant, Odysseas Papadimitriou couldn’t understand what a television news anchor was saying. “It sounded like, ‘Oh my krone,’” he said, “and I was like, what’s that?”
Odysseas Papadimitriou, who runs the credit-card comparison website WalletHub, was aghast when he heard a TV news anchor try to pronounce ‘Omicron.’Even before the pandemic, linguists couldn’t agree on what ancient Greek sounded like, other than that it often didn’t sound like modern Greek. Among scholars, there’s no consensus on how Omicron was pronounced in millennia past. Even in those days, people in different regions spoke their own dialects.
That said, scholars do agree that some pronunciations are definitely wrong, no matter the time period. President Biden has made the common mistake of referring to the variant as “OM-nee-kron,” adding an “n” after the “m.”Fights about Greek pronunciation are more than a “to-MAY-to vs. to-MAH-to” argument. They reflect Mount Olympus-sized worries among Greeks who fret their country, the birthplace of democracy, commands a diminished role on the world stage versus ancient times.
The Greek language has changed drastically from ancient times to the present day, evolving over thousands of years and many empires. The standardized Greek alphabet was formally adopted by the Athenians in 403 B.C., said Prof. D’Angour. The language expanded to different sounds and iterations as the empire of Alexander the Great spread to the present-day Middle East and beyond. More changes occurred during the Byzantine Empire. Modern Greek followed.For instance, U.S.
Behind some of the dissonance: The English letter “g” is replaced by the Greek letter gamma, which has a sound in modern Greek that’s somewhere between a “g” and a “y.” For context, think “gyros.” To Americans, they are JI-roes. To Greeks, the “g” is softer and the sandwich is a YEE-ro.Americans are also used to pronouncing the Greek letter Pi like the English word pie. But in modern Greek, Pi is pronounced Pee.
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