Pronunciation Tool - Omicron

Some pronounce the omicron by shaping the mouth like the "long o" but pronouncing it in he back of the throat like the "short o". I believe this is the pronunciation Logos uses in their "Learn Hebrew and Greek" DVDs.

Although I'm not a languages scholar, all of my colleagues who are pronounce the "o" in Logos as a short o sound. Therefore, I've always thought Logos pronounces its own name incorrectly.

Smyth (Greek Grammar) has two pronunciations - on page 7 is a chart with his classical pronunciation "with modifications" - most of the modifications are to vowel sounds and spirantizing the aspirates Phi Chi and Theta. To get to what he thought the original vowel sounds were, one must go to §24 on pages 12-13, where Smyth considers Omicron and Omega to have had a difference in quality, not just length, but his treatment of the original Greek vowels in general is that the short vowels are more closed than the long vowels, which feels a little counter-intuitive to native English speakers. So Smyth's Omicron is like the 'o' in 'obey' while his original Omega is more open, like the o in French 'encore' (click to hear) (which to my ears sounds fairly close to, but not quite the same as, the 'u' in 'hurt' - but then, did French 'encore' sound different a hundred years ago?). Stephen Daitz' recordings of restored classical pronunciation maintain a similar quality distinction, but the Omega is even more open, like the 'a' in 'saw' (you can hear a snip of Daitz running through the alphabet at the first link here). W. Sidney Allen's Vox Graeca (one of the standard works consulted by folk trying to get at the ancient pronunciation) considers the difference between Omicron and Omega to be one of quantity, not quality - that is, just a matter of length, but he recommends a more open sound for both: Allen's Omicron is like the 'o' in the German 'Gott' (click to hear), while his Omega is like the 'a' in 'saw'. Mark Miner (who has done a fair bit of recording Greek and Latin dramatically at a conversational pace) has a number of recordings of the restored ancient pronunciation, and generally he also treats the difference between Omega and Omicron as one of length/quantity rather than quality, but both of his o-sounds are more rounded 'o' as in 'bone' (though I think I hear him open up the sound slightly from time to time - you can find a sample of Miner's reading here). In using the rounded "long o" for both Omicron and Omega, Miner's recordings match the modified chart at the beginning (§1) of Smyth (for those specific letters - Miner doesn't spirantize Theta, Phi and Chi, for example).

I was taught something like Miner's pronunciation and was genuinely surprised to go back and find that 1) there are differences between Daitz and Allen (I thought that Allen was Daitz' main source), 2) that they both use the more open 'a' in 'saw' for Omega.

I imagine some of the differences in opinion might relate to what evidence one is looking the most closely at. For Smyth's vowel system, examining all the dialects of Ancient Greek seems to have been a driving factor, while Allen's treatment might rely more on looking at the spelling of Greek words borrowed by or transliterated into Latin (which he also wrote a book about: Vox Latina). Other sources might look at 'typos' in inscriptions and manuscripts to figure out what letters sounded alike to writers of those documents. (And, of course, vowel sounds routinely get modified slightly based on the consonants that follow - particularly R/Rho, but also nasals, so one has to be careful not to only look at the vowel in isolation, but also what comes after, whether one is comparing Greek dialects, Latin transliterations or typos.)

But this is all talking about Greek as spoken in Athens in the Classical period - it's not even getting into the debates about what, when and where various changes took place in the Hellenistic period (if the goal is to somehow represent the first century pronunciation - and perhaps one should at least ask the question 'where in the first century?'), and the Erasmian pronunciation, while closer to ancient Greek than Modern Greek, spirantizes the aspirates, which, at least according to Smyth, wasn't a change that happened until after 300 CE (§26), pretty much at the end of the Hellenistic period. I haven't explored the Erasmian pronunciation much, but I'd imagine if one were to survey the textbooks that use some variation of it, one would find at least as much variety as is found in Classical pronunciations.

Even with the homogenizing influence of short travel times, television and telecommunications, Arabic is pronounced differently in Aleppo than in Damascus today. So I think we can safely assume that in the Hellenistic period there was not just one pronunciation of Greek (nor was there in the Classical period).

Please see the following:

http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=logos&submit=Submit

It appears as though the correct answer is:

la-gas for Philosophy and Religion

low-goes for trademark.