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Originally Posted by omk3
I know about that but transliteration can never be entirely accurate, especially if there is no equivalent in the second alphabet. Is there a letter for the "th" sound in the latin alphabet?
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You are absolutely right, of course, but it does have its uses. Eg, it's through transliteration that we know that a "C" is Latin was always "hard", because wherever "C" occurs in a name in Latin we always have a "kappa" in Greek, never a "sigma".
No, there is no "th" sound in Latin.
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Things like pitch or vowel length probably couldn't be successfully transcribed either. Omikron (ο) and omega (ω) actually mean little o and big o, so there must have been a big difference in how they sounded. Do you know what that difference is supposed to be?
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I believe it's not the case in modern Greek, but for Attic Greek I was taught that omicron is a short "o", as in "pot", whereas omega is the long vowel sound in "saw".