Photo: The Canadian Press
World Health Organization logo.
The Greek alphabet arrived on the global stage and into the daily encyclopedia, riding on waves of the new coronavirus as the World Health Organization began naming variants in the Glagolitic script.
As the variants mutated, from Alpha to Delta and then Omicron, people began to note down the 24 Greek letters. Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last.
In June, a committee of experts led by a working group of the World Health Organization announced that they would use the Greek alphabet to name the variants.
“These will be easier to remember and more convenient to use than alphanumeric designations,” the paper said of naming the variants.
“The Greek alphabet is well-established as being generic, as the names of its individual letters have already been used for a wide variety of purposes.”
Mark Pallen, one of the authors of the paper, said 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 then there was a realization that something lighter and smarter was needed.”
Shortly afterwards, the World Health Organization decided to use Greek letters.
It was a bit of an oversight, he said in an interview that no one asked for permission from the Greeks.
“And we fell into the error, which is a fairly common error,” said Pallen, professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “When people talk about the Greeks, they often mean the ancient Greeks, and they forget that the Greeks still exist as a nation.”
But it seems that the Greeks withdrew from the association of their language to the variants of classical Stoicism.
Panayiotis Pappas, president of linguistics at Simon Fraser University, which uses non-binary pronouns, said that “the truth is that it is imperceptible” to any Greek that the letters be 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 professor of linguistics reads Greek newspapers and searched them for reaction to the letters used to name the variants.
“There are lots of other deadly diseases that have Greek names, and we do not complain about that.”
Pappas grew up in northern Greece on a small island called Thasos before moving to the United States for their education and then taking a job at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC
“The Greeks don’t care if the words are pronounced incorrectly or something like that,” Pappas said.
“They have always regarded it as a sign of pride that we have a civilization that is about 3,000 years old and that we are capable of contributing to Western science.”
Tom Archibald, a professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University, studied Greek at a high school in Ontario for three years. His knowledge of modern Greek is “pretty bad,” he said, but he can read it using a dictionary.
“I mean, every working mathematician knows basically the Greek alphabet, even if they can’t say it in order.”
Pappas said the use of the Greek alphabet to name variants has led to more interest in language courses.
“One thing is that we have seen a bit of an increase in linguistics in our courses, which explains the origin and word origin of the language, what we call the etymology science, as more students are interested in the health sciences, how many the background of the English word is either Greek or Latin, “said the professor.
“We offer courses that go through the explanations, and they’ve seen an increase in popularity. People do not want to learn the language themselves, but they want to understand where those words come from.”
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