Greek has an unbroken history of being a written language for over 3,000 years. Many other alphabets around the world also came from the Greek one. Upsilon was even by the fifth century BCE pronounced closer to the Grerman ü or the French u than the its descendent, the Latin u, and we have already seen that Latin had no equivalent for zeta. The Latin alphabet (used to write English and many other languages) came from the Greek alphabet. The WHO said Friday that preliminary evidence "suggests an increased risk of reinfection" compared to other variants of concern.īut scientists are still in the process of researching exactly what the genetic changes mean, to know if the variant is more transmissible or dangerous. The Latin alphabet in its modern form ends with two Greek letters (upsilon and zeta) that were introduced into the language for the purpose of transliterating Greek words. The omicron variant appears to have a high number of mutations in the coronavirus’ spike protein, which could affect how easily it spreads to people. Six other letters were assigned to former variants of interest. The only variants of interest are lambda and mu. The alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron variants make up the list of the WHO’s variants of concern. This table gives the Greek letters, their names, equivalent English letters, and tips for pronouncing those letters which are pronounced differently from the. This is the first time the organization has skipped letters since it began using the Greek alphabet for coronavirus variants it has previously used the alphabet to label 12 others. "To avoid this and to simplify public communications, WHO encourages national authorities, media outlets and others to adopt these new labels." If you want to look for words in other online dictionaries, such as Romanian-English, use the dropdown menu and select. Entering a word in English will also provide you with its Greek equivalent in the Greek-English dictionary. "As a result, people often resort to calling variants by the places where they are detected, which is stigmatizing and discriminatory," the WHO said in a May news release. In order to find the right translation of a Greek word into English, use the search box displayed above. But the WHO found these names were a mouthful to the average person and prone to misreporting.