Omicron: How Should It Be Pronounced? (It's Complicated)

Due to another variant of Covid-19, news reporters and the general public now incessantly talk about the omicron variant. By the way, omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, but this post is not about Covid-19 or vaccines or variants of viruses. Rather, my point pertains to phonology: how a certain morpheme is voiced by non-natural speakers of an ancient language.

My initial answer to the question regarding how omicron (little o) should be pronounced is, it's complicated. What complicates the answer is that ancient Greek letters underwent a change in their pronunciation scheme like Greek words did. I've talked about the different Greek periods before like the Homeric, Koine and Byzantine eras: changes in spelling/orthography and pronunciation were rife because of these developments. Another factor complicating the pronunciation of Greek is the difference between American and British English.

Therefore, how should one pronounce omicron? Donald Mastronarde (Introduction to Attic Greek) suggests that we pronounce omicron like the 'o' in the German "Gott."; Dictionary.com has "om-i-kron and "oh-mi-[kron]. My answer is that either pronunciation is acceptable, but please don't say "omnicron" as I heard one reporter say.

Back in 2014, I posted this entry to the blog:

Όμικρον (ο) has an interesting phonological history. At one time, it was enunciated differently than Ωμέγα. Donald Mastronarde describes Ωμέγα (ω) as "a long open central-back vowel" which was pronounced like the English "saw." On the other hand, Όμικρον is "a short back mid vowel," vocalized like the 'o' in the German "Gott." But, historically, there evidently came a time when ω was no longer phonemically distinguishable from ο in Greek: that is why the Byzantines made a morphemic/graphemic distinction between Ωμέγα and Όμικρον. And, if you will notice today, some say λόγος with a short 'o" and others treat Όμικρον in the word as a long vowel. Again, either way is acceptable except to the most persnickety purist.

For what it is worth, I purchased a copy of Randall Buth's proto-CD for "Emic Koine." Buth says that ω = ο in Modern Greek--ο is lower than ω in the Erasmian system and in the Allen-Daitz "restored Attic" system, ω is longer and lower than ο. The page found here is also quite helpful:

http://www.biblicalgreek.org/links/pronunciation.html