Paul Wolff
2021-11-28 13:53:11 UTC
When I learned Greek, I liked the neat way that they had two letters for
'O' while we used only one. They had the 'o mega' and the 'o micron'
versions, for the long and the short sounds respectively. Logical, I
thought, and easy to remember.
I never thought about the stress patterns we learned for these two
vowels, which were not mutually consistent - second syllable stress in
omicron, but first syllable stress in omega, where second seems more
sensible. I checked the OED, and those scholars confirm that English
likes the ways I was taught to pronounce the names of those letters.
But Auntie Beeb has been deeply offending my ears this weekend with
their "omicron variant" where 'omicron' is all short vowels and has a
pretty even stress pattern, like 'catalogue' in BrE, to take an example.
What has happened? Are they in any sense correct, or are they all just
ignorant and too lazy to look it up?
'O' while we used only one. They had the 'o mega' and the 'o micron'
versions, for the long and the short sounds respectively. Logical, I
thought, and easy to remember.
I never thought about the stress patterns we learned for these two
vowels, which were not mutually consistent - second syllable stress in
omicron, but first syllable stress in omega, where second seems more
sensible. I checked the OED, and those scholars confirm that English
likes the ways I was taught to pronounce the names of those letters.
But Auntie Beeb has been deeply offending my ears this weekend with
their "omicron variant" where 'omicron' is all short vowels and has a
pretty even stress pattern, like 'catalogue' in BrE, to take an example.
What has happened? Are they in any sense correct, or are they all just
ignorant and too lazy to look it up?
--
Paul
(in a bit of a huff)
Paul
(in a bit of a huff)