Something else you might find satisfying is the names of υ and ε: upsilon and epsilon, respectively. "Psilon" means "simple", so their names mean "simple u" and "simple e". They are called that because their are also "complex e/u"s: written ει and ου. EDIT: the complex "e" and "u" are αι and οι.
You were very lucky discovering that fact early. It took me 45 years, studying maths and physics and living 25 years in Greece. But I made this discovery by myself. I felt like Archimedes with donkey ears that day.
Working something out yourself is worth so much more. It dawned on me one day that wisdom is earned through pain. I've tried to explain it to others, but you either get it, or you don't.
@@Fizz-Pop yeah, I would totally agree. But oh well, if that realization is to come to them, then so be it, will be on there own time. Used to be the person who didn’t have those, but in the last couple years it’s been something popping up every few days, and I think you feel even bigger satisfaction knowing you did it without having it coaxed out of you in any way. There’s something worth having pride in there.
In Greek it's Alpha and Omega. But notice in English it's encompassed by the A and zerO. A and 0 is Alpha and Omega. The alphabet and numbers. Like in the movie The Matrix the Architect and Oracle A&0.
My first Classical Greek class we did the alphabet, and this was specifically pointed out by my (excellent) teacher. Along with the name for the letters that obviously give it up. We had the same teacher in Latin (talking Latin in elementary school 5-8th grade, Greek from 7-8th grade), and we were trained to successfully translate Greek into Latin and vice versa by the end of 8th elementary grade school.
@@rais1953 tbh it actually indirectly is, since my learning of Latin was helped by my previous full knowledge of French, but then the knowledge of both Latin and French allowed me to learn both Italian and Spanish with great ease. Along I can read Portuguese, although I can't speak it and do not understand it fully spoken to me. I'd have no problems throughout Latin America, cause I'd most likely pick up enough of the Brazilian Portuguese in a very short time being in the country.
What’s even more interesting is these letters only acquired their names *after* the two sounds had merged into one at some point in the evolution of Koine Greek and possibly a bit into the Byzantine era. Before that each letter could be uniquely identified simply by making each letter’s respective sound, but after the two sounds merged that was no longer possible as they would simply sound the same, and so the Greeks came up with this naming in order to be able to refer to them separately.
I wonder what to make of the book of Revelation (written late 1st c.), where Jesus says, I am the alpha and the o. The letter is the omega, but it's not spelled out as omega, only the letter itself is given, while it seems that other letters are already named.
@@ljss6805 The two possibilities are, (a) as you say, the text simply puts down the letter ω without giving it a name, or alternatively (b) the name of the letter *was* in fact just ω, pronounced with a long /o:/ or something like that. Note that the latter would be consistent with a maintenance of a vowel length contrast, as it would need to be distinct from ο pronounced with a short /o/ mayhaps. I’m not an expert in the history of Greek phonology, but in general the thing that scholars look for are scribal errors in papyri or inscriptions. If scribes have the tendency to mix up two letters that strongly suggests that the sounds they represent have undergone a merger. I do know that the loss of contrastive vowel length is first evidenced from the Egyptian / Alexandrian dialect of Koine Greek from the late Hellenistic period, and that over the course of the centuries this loss of vowel length gradually spread out until by the 4th century it had become generalized across the Greek-speaking world. So the question is not just about the dating of the text, but also its geographical location-so we’d need to see what the linguistic situation was for Greek speakers on Patmos and the Dodecanese more generally, assuming that is where Revelations was composed.
@@ThatBernie My sense is that omega was already sounding the same as omicron across a broader swath of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean than we think, certainly by the 1st c. CE, but that the author wrote omega by itself anyway because he had no alternative name for it. It wasn't yet called omega, but what else was he going to do? It's a more complicated hypothesis on the surface and one that should usually be eliminated if we apply Occam's razor, except that when you zoom out and need to account for even more variables, nearly all the evidence from the specific time frame (not copies of later times) and various regions largely attest to the merging of the omicron and omega sounds into one by the 1st c. CE, even earlier. We see this in inscriptions and papryri written by authors who spoke Greek as a second language and who made mistakes when writing the omicron in place of omega and vice versa (a different kind of error). We see similar phenomena in terms of the pronunciation of dipthongs, like ai=e, ei=i, oi=i, y=i, eta=i, au=av/af, eu=ev/ef, etc. It's also telling how others in foreign languages transcribe the names into their own language.
Riiiiiiiiight!! Like in most languages that use the latin letters, B and V sound different so they are called some variation of Be and Ve. But in Spanish we don't pronounce them differently (at least in most accents) so we have different names to separate them. In different Spanish speaking countries they are known as Be and Uve, Be Alta and V Baja, Be Larga and V Corta, those are the ones I know.
@@ljss6805 Also, consider this: how do you spell letters? Surely it makes sense to simply refer to a letter with that letter, so it’s sensible that the author of Revelation just wrote A and Ω, reading it «άλφα» and «ωμέγα» in his head, but not bothering to write it all out for lack of space.
In two thousand years in Futuristic English they’re gonna be all like “oh my god... it’s called dublyu because ‘double U’ and back when they wrote in cursive it looked like two u’s”
It's very rare that Omicron is used as a variable name, since it looks indistinguishable from O, which itself is hard to tell apart from a zero. Only things I ever see O used for, is naming points like the origin, where it is just as likely that you'd call it point zero.
😂. Noticed that a long, long time ago. (Of course, I was a classics major in college.) That said, when I noticed it, I felt so smart 🤓 (as though Greeks and others hadn't noticed before).
OMG - i love this!!! i’m part Greek but don’t no much about the language. you always point out these interesting facts about language - like the words in French which are easy to figure out. that was fabulous. thanks so much. (from NY, NY) 😊🌷🌱🇬🇷
I don’t think the long o sound and the short o one correspond to the o’s in Eng. “no” and “not”! In Ancient Greek the difference is to be found in quantity, not quality (the long o in English is, in fact, a diphthong).
Long and short O is also heavily dependent on dialect. American English doesn't differentiate between short and long Os where British English (and I assume the rest of the non-North American Common Wealth) does. Dr. Geoff Lindsay has a good video about this titled "Length and Linking in British, American and Australian Accents".
@@Bradoslav he was talking about the Os in Ancient Greek though and used English as an example to explain it, I’m aware they’re realised differently in English…
@@ChristianJiang Right, but the long-short O you are talking about isn't the same as what this video is talking about. There is no sound change in the English long vs short o. It's the duration of the sound. That's the same as how it works in Greek. My point is that American English doesn't have this differentiation between long and short O (the dipthong is just an element of orthography and is irrelevant) when British does. No in English English uses the long O. Not uses the short. No isn't using a different sound, just a longer duration.
@@BradoslavNo: /nəʊ/ (UK), /noʊ/ (US). Not: /nɒt/ (UK), /nɑt/ (US). In the first one it is pronounced as a dipthong, nothing to do with ortography. And the sounds are in fact different. And as you can see, there are no long vowels in this example, which would be marked with a colon. Shortly put, they are called long and short in English because they sort of used to be that historically. But today they are not.
they also have "epsilon", which means "simple e", as opposed to digraphs that are pronounced "e" (like "oi") as well. the names were given by byzantine scholars. they had to deal with a somewhat confused system, as their pronunciation had already shifted significantly from that of the classical era.
Interesting it kept that meaning, even after more and more letters were appended to the ancient list. Don't you Swedes even add the Umlaut vowels as legitimate members at the end of the alphabet? Still, you didn't change it to "från A till Ö". In German, we adapted the idiom to the full Latin alphabet by saying "von A bis Z" (fonn a biss tsett) when we mean something "all inclusive". However, we say that something is the "A und O", meaning the essence of something else.
The good thing about moments where you’re made to feel stupid is that they’re almost always followed by moments where you are, in fact, that much smarter.
it is the same case in latin where Y is called something like I graeca because the sound did not exist there but when they wanted to write words of greek origin they would use it, probably the french is a version of the latin.
I learned that about 6 months ago and had the same 🤯 reaction. I also realized this same sort of naming convention in Spanish. I learned "Y" as igriega and "I" as just "ee." But "I" was actually once (or still is, but more formally?) i-latina... as in the latin I... and Y is i-griega or the Greek I.
Same in Polish: "y" is called "igrek" (when you put a hyphen, you'll see i-grek and it's all clear). However, pronunciation of this letter is far from "i", there is no such sound in English nor in many European languages.
@@vivvpprof I'm sorry to disappoint you, but "I live" is not even close. Polish "y" is different, much much deeper. Probably the closest sound to "y" is produced by a male deer when roaring trying to attract a female. If you can, go to a forest where they live and listen. Right now is the time for deers for mating, so hurry up, they will not keep waiting for you. Or just find a Polish film on YT and listen in original how it sounds.
Phoenician didn't have symbols for the vowels at all. The Greeks invented them, or rather used existing Phoenician symbols for sounds that Greek doesn't have.
@@florisv559 yes exactly. The greeks took the phoenicia symbols they didn’t need, for the vowels: ‘aleph for a, he for e, `ain for o. But without distinction for length. Initially they used het for the “h” sound, but when that sound mostly disappeared from the greek language, they recycled the letter Η for “long open e”.
It's awesome how clever it is. I'm Greek and was doing ancient Greek in my school for six years and only in my last year understood that...I was as amazed as you!!!
There are two more letters in the Greek alphabet that fall under that rule. Ε as in "pet" and Y as in "tip" (E-ψιλον, Υ-ψιλον) meaning E-thin and Y-thin as opposed to the 'thick' "αι" for the sound of E as in "there", and the 'thick' Hτα (eta) as in "sheep"
another thing that i find interesting Poseidon = god of the sea, when i think of him, i see him holding a trident The letter Psi looks like a trident and the letters p and s are the first letters of the respective syllables. Also Zeus as god of the sky and weather, I connect with lightnings the letter zeta, especially the small letter zeta, looks like a lightning
Those little links make learning - remembering, so much easier. Like adding up digits in long numbers, to see if they are divisible by 3... Those little 'hacks' I believe they are now called, are little gems.
@@fmmaj9noname332 after 40 years I am finally starting to realize this more and more every day. I almost feel the same way about video discussing these letters appearing in my feed .
This is weirdly something that dawned on me a few months ago, despite being familiar with the Greek alphabet for years (because of maths, not the language). I blew my own mind!
In Dutch, we have 'short ei' and 'long ij'. (Don't try to pronounce it, there's nothing similar in English). The 'ij' if formally a single character (ligature) and you'll find it on Dutch keyboards.
I acquired Koine Greek in my 40s; Latin in my 30s; German in my 20s; French in my teens. I'm considering Hebrew, Spanish, or Russian. It doesn't matter which language I choose, it matters that I keep learning new stuff.
I find Russian to have similarities to greek, german and strangely enough to japanese which is fascinating consideringg they are from another branch of languages. Some of the similarities are probably just coincidence.
5 years of Latin, 2 of Greek. I had a swollen head and thought I knew everything… but I didn’t. Now I do. At age 68 I am now officially a ‘know it all’.
obviousness -- but "obviousity" would be understood. I can't recall if "-ness" is a Saxon English (Germanic) suffix or a Norman French (Latinate) suffix, but English sometimes combines roots and prefixes / suffixes from both, instead of harmonizing them.
A similar phenomenon are the two letters Υυ and Εε (Ypsilon and Epsilon): ψιλόν psilon means easy/less complex, so the complex ε is αι and the complex υ is οι .
People are just dumb, they utter words that they never reflect upon. That's how all those orwellian dictators spring up and enthrall their peoples, through language that no longer reflects reality, yet nobody takes a moment to think about it.
You might find this satisfying too: In German, we have a saying for that can be used instead of „the absolute necessary, the bare minimum“ but also „the most important thing, the most basic“ which goes as: Das A und O. Meaning „The A and O“. But it actually comes from „From A to Z“, but since the last letter of the greek alphabet is an Omega, germans mistook the Omega for an O and just copied the saying without realising the idea behind the whole thing. Still, its a common phrase in German and everyone is just using it wrong. 😅
Wow! Just saw your 3 Tricks for reading French when you don’t know it video and subscribed on the spot…..came here, married to a wonderful Greek for 50 years and can speak the language and didn’t know this! What are you going to blow me away with in the next video of yours that I watch??? 👏👏👏
This was the first thing I noticed when srarting to learn the Greek alphabet recently with a Greek friend. I 💚 your channel, so wonderful to learn and connect lingo stuff with others who get excited about it all 😊
Absolutely. I mentioned this to a few of my Greek friends and when I d finished explaining, they looked slightly puzzled for a second or two they smiled, (evidently the light bulb came on) they looked at me and, “ahhhh.....yes, of course.”
And in French I was very mystified to learn the letter y is called "eegrek"-- realized decades later that it's in effect "Greek Y" or "Y grecque" (that might be the wrong gender).
