Learn how to write nee and omega
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| Hi everybody, this is Stefania! Welcome to Greekpod101.com’s Alfaveeto made easy. |
| The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn the Greek alphabet: the alfaveeto! |
| This lesson is also a landmark: after you finish it, you will have covered more than half of this series and two thirds of the Greek alphabet! What do you think of Greek letters now? Do they seem as hard as they did when you started? You know quite a lot by now, so a few more won’t make a difference, will they? On one hand they won’t. But on the other, of course they will since you can’t really write Greek without them! |
| The first letter today is a consonant, “Nee” –yes, pronounced just like the knee on your leg. Its sound in Greek is “n”, and its shape will seem very familiar. |
| Notice something a little off? Let’s first look at the uppercase “Nee”. |
| It is handwritten like this: |
| Ν |
| And this is what the lowercase “Nee” looks like. |
| It is handwritten like this: |
| v |
| So what do we notice? The uppercase is identical to the English “n” but the lowercase looks exactly like a “v”. This might prove a bit tricky, but since “Nee” is such a common letter, you’ll get used to it in no time. |
| Let’s do it again- Here’s the uppercase form: |
| And here’s the lowercase form: |
| And now for something completely different from English. Even though we haven’t finished our lessons yet, here’s the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Have you heard its name before? It’s “Omega”. The sound it makes is “oh” -- yes, just like “Omikron”. |
| Here is an uppercase “Omega”. |
| It is handwritten like this, or this: |
| Ω (both ways) |
| And this is what the lowercase “Omega” looks like. |
| It is handwritten like this: |
| ω |
| As you can see there is a similarity between the uppercase “Omega” and “Omikron” when they’re handwritten, right? |
| Let’s do it again- Here’s the uppercase form: |
| And here’s the lowercase form: |
| Think of “Omega” as a big “Omikron” Actually, this is what its name means: Omega: “Big Oh”, while “Omikron” means “Small Oh”. |
| Now let’s see what new words we can make. So adding “Pee” and “Yota”, we get something we do every day, that is the verb “to drink”. In Greek this is “πίνω” and it’s written this way: |
| πίνω |
| There is something in this word which shows why “Omega” is one of the most important letters of the Greek language: it is the ending letter for the dictionary form of verbs; A good example is the verb, “έχω”, “to have”. Lets write it together: |
| Έχω |
| 16 letters down, 8 to go! Not bad, huh? Let’s put them all together and see what we have! “Alpha”, “Mee”, “Taf”, “Yota”, “Kappa”, “Omikron”, “Pee”, “Sigma”, “Eeta”, “Psee”, “Gama”, “Epseelon”, “Ro”, “Hee”, “Nee” and “Omega”. |
| Now it's time for Stefania’s insights |
| In our first lesson, we started with the letter “Alfa” and in this lesson we learned “Omega” -these are the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet. |
| In Greek, as in English, saying that something is “To Alfa kai to Omega” or “The Alfa and the Omega”, means that something is “very important”, that if you have this, you also have everything in between. |
| So, “The Alfa and the Omega of writing Greek is practice!” -it’s a cliche but it’s true! |
| Do you know what “Greece” is called in Greek? Many people might think it is, well, “Greece”. It isn’t and in the next lesson, we will learn how to write it! |
| See you in the next Alfaveeto made easy lesson! |
| Ya hara! |
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