There’s a word in Egyptian Arabic, بدروم (bud-ROOM) that means basement or below ground floor. I always thought this came from English ‘bedroom’ for some reason. But no, that came from Turkish bodrum, which came from Ancient Greek ὑπόδρομος (Ew-POH-droh-moe-s). Noting that the Turkish word is spelled the same way as that of the city of Bodrum, but it’s a coincidence. The city name comes from ‘Petronium’, which is related to St. Peter.
Back to the Greek basement, ὑπόδρομος / upodromos. That comes from ὑπό / upo meaning below or under, and δρομος/ dromos meaning path here, so the whole word meant ‘underground.’ If we were to Anglicize that word, it’d be ‘hypodrome.’ ὑπό became hypo in English, like hypothermia or hypodermic, like under the skin.
Now that first Greek letter in ὑπό is called upsilon. And that letter was the basis for the letter Y in the Latin alphabet. In German the Y is still called Ypsilon, pronounced like the French “u” (/y/ in IPA). But in languages like French or Spanish, the letter is called ‘Greek I’ and a pronounced “ee”. This might be because speakers of the latin language couldn’t say ‘u’ (/y/) and made it into ‘ee’, or maybe because back then the Greeks themselves had started pronouncing the upsilon as an ‘ee’.
Because the Greeks had a vowel shift starting in the first century BC where the pronunciation of ‘υ’ (upsilon) and ‘η’ (eta), among others, became ‘ee’. Like the pronunciation of the iota, which is why the shift is called ἰωτακισμός (yo-tah-keyz-MOSS). So modern Greeks, other than probably being pissed at me for pronouncing the vowels wrong (by modern greek standards), would call these letters EE-psilon and EE-ta. Anyway, this video was all over the place, wasn’t it?
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