Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "AI Can Do Maths Now, and it's Wild" video.

  1. I think the British pronunciation of "upsilon" and "epsilon" highlights the etymology of the names. Long ago, the Greeks forgot the names for ε, υ, ο, ω, and some other letters. So they just called them by their sound, the way we do vowels in English, like we just call E "ee." But as some of these vowels started to sound like each other, they added words to the names to distinguish them, like "little o" for omicron and "big o" for omega, similar to the way some Spanish-speakers call b and v "be larga" and "ve corta" or similar. In the case of ε and υ, "psilon" meant "bare," on its own, so an epsilon is a bare e. This distinguished it from αι, which had the same sound. Similarly, upsilon is a bare u, as opposed to ου.
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  2. But did it change chess for the better? I mean, play is now higher in quality, but is it as exciting, or beautiful, or fun? A lot of GMs seem pretty unsatisfied with the current state of chess at the top level, what with it becoming so drawish and dependent on specific preparation.
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  3.  @JivanPal  It's not eps + ilon but e + psilon. Neither the British nor the Americans pronounce these letters the same as the modern Greeks or the ancient Greeks, but the way the British pronounce them emphasizes the two morphemes, whereas the American pronunciation does not.
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