VANCOUVER – The Greek alphabet reached the world stage and everyday lexicon riding the waves of the new coronavirus when the World Health Organization began naming variants in Glagolitic writing.
As the variants mutated, from Alpha to Delta and then Omicron, people began to take note of the 24 Greek letters. Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last.
In June, an expert committee led by a World Health Organization task force announced that they would use the Greek alphabet to name the variants.
“These will be easier to remember and more practical to use than alphanumeric designations,” the document said.
“The Greek alphabet is well established as generic, as the names of its individual letters have already been used for a multitude of purposes.”
Mark Pallen, one of the authors of the paper, said that the scientific method of using letters and numbers was cumbersome and confusing. Most people resorted to using the name of the place where the variant was first discovered, creating a stigma for that country, he noted.
“And so it was recognized that something easier and faster was needed.”
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Soon after, the World Health Organization decided to use Greek letters.
It was a “small oversight,” he said in an interview, that no one asked the Greeks for permission.
“And we fell into the error, which is a fairly common mistake,” said Pallen, professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “When people talk about the Greeks, they are often referring to the ancient Greeks, and they forget that the Greeks still exist as a nation.”
As the variants mutated, from Alpha to Delta and then Omicron, people began to take note of the 24 Greek letters. Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last. # COVID-19
But it seems that the Greeks ignored the association of their language with the variants with classical Stoicism.
Panayiotis Pappas, chair of linguistics at Simon Fraser University who uses non-binary pronouns, said that “there is really nothing special” to any Greek that the letters are used to name deadly variants.
And it’s not just the letters, as “so many” Greek words are used in science, Pappas said in an interview.
The linguistics teacher reads Greek newspapers and examines them for reactions to the letters used to name the variants.
“There are many other deadly diseases that have Greek names, and we don’t complain about that.”
Pappas grew up in northern Greece on a small island called Thasos before moving to the United States for his education and then taking a job at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC.
“The Greeks don’t even care if the words are mispronounced or something like that,” Pappas said.
“They have always taken it as a sign of pride that, you know, we have a civilization that is about 3,000 years old and that we are capable of contributing to Western science.”
Tom Archibald, a mathematics professor at Simon Fraser University, studied Greek in high school in Ontario for three years. His knowledge of modern Greek is “pretty bad,” he said, but he can read it with the help of a dictionary.
“I mean, every mathematician who works basically knows the Greek alphabet, even if he can’t say it in order.”
Pappas said the use of the Greek alphabet to name variants has led to increased interest in linguistics courses.
“All we have seen is a small increase in linguistics in our courses, which explains the origins of language and words, what we call the science of etymology, as more students are interested in the fields of languages. health sciences, where many the background of the word in English is Greek or Latin ”, said the professor.
“We offer courses that go through those explanations, and those have seen a bit of a rise in popularity. People don’t want to learn the language, per se, but they want to understand where these words come from.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on December 24, 2021.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com