While watching an incredibly insipid version of Jason and the Argonauts where it seemed the actors were bored out of their minds while woodenly reading their lines, my mind started wandering a bit.
Was “Jason” really the guy’s name, or is that merely the English version of his name? In Ancient Greek, would it have been “Jason” or something else?
Yes, apparently so.
It was certainly ó Ιάσων when I did it in Greek at school.
Tis board doesn’t seem to reproduce Greek characters, but here is how Jason is spelled in the original Greek.
Wouldn’t the word in Greek you guys are reproducing be pronounced “ee-ya-son”?
-FrL-
We pronounced it Ya-son.
Since I don’t read Greek at all, showing me the written form doesn’t help me at all. I think I was going for pronounciation. Would “Jason” said at the time the man lived (assuming he’s not a complete fiction) sound like “Jason” or something else to my ears?
The J-sound wouldn’t be there, it would be like a Y-sound. Think of German, where “Jah” is pronounced “Yah.” Ancient Eastern Mediterranean languages didn’t have a J-sound; many of them came to English as J through German, in fact; like, say, biblical names. The Hebrew was Yosef; in German, the initial Y-sound was written J, so spelled Josef (but pronounced Yosef) by Luther in his translation of the bible into German. That came into English through the German spelling, where the leading J was pronounced “J” so we got Joseph. Similarly for many Greek/Latin names, such as Iupiter = Jupiter, Iason = Jason, etc.
Hm. I’d’ve thought you’d pronounce it ‘JI-sin’. 
Okay, but how many German Rastafarians are there?
Well, they do have a lot of clocks. But after the number is increased by exactly one, is it decreased by exactly one? And do they have bowling alleys?
The answers have been given, but I have to bring in something almost completely irrelevant. In the 1932 Weird Tales story “Wings in the Night”, Robert . Howard’s hero Solomon Kane encounters the remnants of the harpies Jason encountered, now living in the heart of Africa. The locals remwember that they were defeated far to the north by someone named “N’Yasunna” ( = “Jason”)