Olympic ceremony question-Greek

[Dog80]

@matt_mcl

One that startled me was that Ecuador wasn’t transliterated, but translated (“Isémerinos”.)

That’s indeed strange. All Greek maps have a transliteration of Ecuador, usually “Εκουαδόρ”.

[Terminus_Est]

@Dog80

There is no ‘mp’ sound in Greek (eg. as in the English word ‘imp’). The diphthong ΜΠ always makes a ‘b’ sound. It is impossible to make a word sound like ‘mpenin’ in greek. It can only come out as ‘benin’. The same applies to the diphthong ΝΤ which always makes a ‘d’ sound. Never ‘nt’.

So what sounds do Β and Δ now make?

[JRDelirious]

Thanks, Dog80. So indeed that’s how you transcribe the foreign sound of plosive-B into Modern Greek. I should suppose then that the “B” countries that are listed under the betas are indeed cases of older names that got transcribed that way

@Terminus Est

So what sounds do Β and Δ now make?

IIRC beta makes a “v”-ish sound, (maybe not quite exactly like the English V?)

@matt_mcl

One that startled me was that Ecuador wasn’t transliterated, but translated (“Isémerinos”.)

I noticed also one inconsistency with the “saint” nations: the English-named St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Italian-named San Marino were translated, into “Ágios/ágia (Greek name of the saint)”, but the Portugese-named Saô Tomé e Príncipe was just transcribed into “sao”.

[Giles]

In Modern Greek, the letter beta has a sound a lot like English V, except that it’s billabial (both lips together) rather than labio-dental (bottom lip against upper teeth) as in English V. Similarly, Greek phi has a billabial sound, where English F is labio-dental. (Since the difference is not a phoneme in either English or in Modern Greek, native speakers of both languages usually can’t hear the difference).

[MovieMogul]

@Dog80

That’s indeed strange. All Greek maps have a transliteration of Ecuador, usually “Εκουαδόρ”.

A-ha! So that’s why it took so long for my home country to appear in the procession! Thanks for the info!

[Angua]

According to my Greek supervisor, the sound made by Β is in fact more of a “v” sound than a “b” sound, so more “veta” as opposed to “beta”. Δ is a “d” sound.

[lynxie]

Thank you all for answerng the questios I was “afraid” to ask! I was especially confused about the esses at the beginning and Viet Nam. Still, it was odd seeing Canada so far down the list.