Now I have been practicing my pronunciation of omicron and omega so that they have the same quality but a different quantity. Omicron as in "obey" and omega as in "own". (If pronounced as the "aw" sound I get it confused with alpha.) Omega standing for omicron really confuses me. If it is has the same quantity and quality as omicron, why didn't they write omicron? But if it is short and distinct from omicron, then it must be qualitatively different. Which suggests that omega was qualitatively different from omicron.Ollendorff wrote:Gen. Sing. ταώ instead of ταῶ. ἀνώγεων Proparoxytone throughout, ω standing for ο, and being regarded as having but half its usual length.
The way I had learned omicron was the sound in "on", while omega was the sound of "own". Correcting this pronunciation promises to make me more sensitive to vowel quantity, which helps in reading verse, but I was hoping that I was moving closer to an Attic pronunciation. But ἀνώγεων makes me wonder about that.
Is there some peculiar explanation for why the Attic Greeks would write omega for the sound of omicron?