Assassin's Creed Odyssey - It's time to Greek out

@Rock8man @divedivedive Ah, that clears things up a bit. Thanks for clueing me in!

To me it’s a strange choice in terms of the fiction, but I see how it serves to explain all the “videogame stuff”.

I played through the first one, the second one, maybe a quarter of the third, and all of Liberation - but I was pretty much always rushing or skipping through the modern day scenes. It’s very much not my bag. I’m there to see Tyre and meet the hashasheen and stuff :)

I am getting back into this after reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, which I am halfway through. May I say that as a sequel, The Odyssey delivers? It’s The Empire Strikes back to Star Wars.

How is the pronouncian of ancient Greek places and people in this game? They are so much different than how I have been pronouncing them. For instance, Diomedes is one of the conquerers of Thebes, which I always read as “Th-ee-bs”. But a character just pronounced it as “Thee-o-bee-a”. How did they know how to prounounce all these ancient names? Is there a method or is it just based on modern Greek?

I would guess (hope?) they consulted classicists who can at least offer an educated guess as to how Greek would have been pronounced at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Dunno, though.

Some of the pronunciations did surprise me. Euboea is pronounced “ev-BEY-ah,” which was news to me. I just pronounced it in my head as it reads in English, something like “you-BOW-ia.” I just assumed the folks making the game were more knowledgeable about it than me. Which isn’t exactly a high bar to clear.

I think a construction like ‘Thebes’ may also reflect a later anglicization (?) of the Greek. According to Wikipedia it is originally spelled Θῆβαι, (Thêbai) I wonder if that’s anything like e.g. Napoli > Naples. Note: IANAL*

*I am not a linguist

Thanks for clarifying, I thought it was a sex thing.

Man, careful with that joke, it’s an antique from Ancient Usenet.

…but how is it pronounced?

In the one year of ancient Greek I took, there seemed to be a “standard” pronunciation for ancient Greek that is definitely not how they said it but rather comes by way of Latin and how many Greek names were Latinized and then Anglicized. And then there’s the “best guess” version that’s maybe closer to how they said things based one whatever clues clever people can find.

…no idea what the game went with, though. ;)

I dunno… @JoshoB any insight here?

Also, I got my wife to watch Ulysses (the Kirk Douglas one) the other night and I have to say, it was pretty good. Douglas (and everyone else) speaks Italian throughout, and it looks look it put the Delaurentis family (and Dino) on the map. The whole thing is filmed and lit very play like. It looks to me like they actually built a ship for the movie (as well as some models of it). Pretty neat.

When Circe is introduced, she was not super familiar with that part (moreso the Sirens and Cyclops) and I explained she was Helios’s daughter and her sister gave birth to the Minotaur. She goes "So wait, the Minotaur is her nephew?

Yes, I guess he was. Had to laugh at that one.

Ha ha, that means The Aeneid is Return of the Jedi. Suck it, Virgil!

-Tom

Most of the Greek names/words in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are pronounced following modern Greek conventions, not ancient Greek. So, IIRC, Euboea is pronounced EH-vee-a, except in those instances where it’s Latinized anyway.

Handling ancient Greek is always tricky. Every scholar usually has a disclaimer at the start of their book(s) in which they apologize for being inconsistent. For my PhD, for example, I figured sticking as close to the ancient Greek was the way to go (so my subtitle featured “Mykenaian” instead of “Mycenaean”), except in cases where this would be silly (e.g. Athens and not Athenai). Ugh. I’ve since gone back on this – because it tends to be confusing to those not in the know! – and stick with forms that are most common in the English language, which tends to be Latinized forms (so: Apollo, not Apollon, etc.). I am also ignoring differences between short (omicron, epsilon) and long vowels (omega, eta): in Apollon, the second O is long, for example.

Anyway, when it comes to pronouncing: there are certain rules that a Classicist is probably better able to answer. For the most part, koine Greek is used as the standard in scholarship, which is mostly based on Attic, but from the Hellenistic period. But already in the Hellenistic period, we can see, from misspellings etc., a move to “iotification”. If you listen to modern Greek, there’s a lot less variety when it comes to vowels/diphthongs, because a lot of sounds have been turned into “ee” (iota) sounds. Hence, “hoi polloi” doesn’t have the “oy” sounds anymore (oy, guv’nor!), but sounds like “hee pollee”. Other diphthongs have also become simplified, like alpha-iota now sounding like a short E: “kai” is now pronounced as “keh” (and if it’s in front of a vowel, as “kj” and connected to the following word).

But from what I remember from the game, they mostly stick to modern Greek. A lot the Greek that you hear when going through towns and villages, for example, is entirely modern. “Malaka” is a good example; as far as I know, it’s use as a curseword is purely modern usage. (Again, not a linguist. But as a point of interest: the word does derive from an ancient word, namely “malakos” – when Hector’s lifeless corpse is dragged into the Greek camp in the Iliad, the Greeks make fun of him and say that he is “soft”.)

Not cool, Greeks. Have some respect.

Loved that post, @JoshoB!

-Tom

This forum needs a like button. Have I said that lately?

I didn’t know “Hoi Polloi” was actually pronounced “Hee Pollee”

Now if we could get a Belgian on the board, so I would know how to pronounce WWI names. Like HTF do you pronounce “Aisne”?

I think that’s only used in Wordle :)

Enn, roughly

If you use modern Greek pronunciation, except no H – I was trying to convey how the sounds changed, but modern Greek doesn’t aspirate. Should’ve made that clear. ;-)

Good to have your input again @JoshoB

The new 60fps patches are good!

In practice, the three consoles form a sort of neat progression, with a roughly even difference in clarity as you step between the three versions. Series S looks a bit blurry, PS5 is more detailed and stable but still slightly rough, and Series X usually looks pretty 4K-like, with plenty of fine detail.