except me and i wont tell you how
Ngl Futurama has literally ruined my ability to take the omicron variant seriously because of this
the incredibly high amount of engagemtn to this post convinced me i should reveal the secret.
in classical attic greek its ο μῑκρόν, "small o", where the first and last syllable are like the "oh" sound in english but short, and the second syllable is like the "ee" sound in "feet" and long. none of the syllables are stressed but the last syllable has a higher pitch than the others.
this is only true for like 5th century greek spoken in athens. as you go later it changes. but not that much in the case of this particular word.
HWOWever this is kind of fucked up anyways cause in plato's time at least (4th century bce) the letter still wasnt called that, it was just called "o" (he talks abt this in Cratylus) so calling it this name but using a classical attic pronunciation is itself anachronistic
truly excellent post. ive been eating a lot of celery lately. godspeed
Like broccoli and cauliflower and corn, prehistoric people did not have celery to eat
i think later (not sure how much later) omicron and omega merged to have the same quality but were still different in length, then later vowel length was no longer distinctive and such is greek today. so presumably at some point when the two "o" sounds were becoming more similar some weirdo grammarian decided to give them more descriptive names
Kinda fun that in Russian it happened to a bunch of letters, now duplicate letters were just thrown out, and it happened twice - during Peter the Great reforms and after October Revolution.
We don't really pronounce greek letters properly though. I just go with the futurama pronounciation (Omicron Persei 8).
No one pronounces Pi as pee, even though that's more correct. I had a class where the instructor pronounced Phi as fee (which is more correct) but still said Pi=Pie because otherwise no one would know what he's talking about.
Pronouncing loan words properly is a fool's errand. People also look at you funny for saying BrusKetta instead of how Bruschetta looks like it should be pronounced in English.
Say it like an Irish person exclaiming "ah mi crayon!" for everyone to like you
rare time that being greek has a use
also it should be an easy word to not mispronounce even for anglos, weird
Oh no, I’ve been reading it as oh-mih-cron.
Haven’t said it out loud yet though.
You can pronounce it in other languages, just not in English.
Much like the country that Prague is the capital of.
It sounds cute in Japanese. It could be the name of an anime character for little kids.
