μπείκον / BAY-kin / bacon
Yes, the Greek word for bacon is bacon. But I thought the how of it was interesting, and it was one of the first words I learned in Greek, so it has a special place in my heart.
(In Lefkada, in the first week or so, we were trying to find some restaurant that was one, open in the winter and two, served something that was easy enough for non-speakers to obtain. We were driving around the downtown area — think, like, a third the size of downtown COS — and it felt like the low-hanging fruit places were all closed — pizza, bakeries, whatever. We finally came around a corner and thought about giving up and going to the grocery store when we found a little pizza-slash-bakery that sold peinirli which will get its own entry some day, but for the moment, all you need to know is that they had flavors, and as I started trying to parse out the words in the menu, I sounded out μπείον and then sheepishly realized it was the English word bacon.)
(Bacon peinirli are pretty good btw.)
What’s silly about it is that Greek has no ‘B’ sound. Sure, they have a Β/β, but it sounds like a ‘V.’ Yes, beta is really veta. So when they started adding words from other languages, they made a digraph of letters they already had that I GUESS sounds closest to a ‘B’ sound, and thus bacon became mpacon.
There are a couple of others. The one I know second best after MP=B is NT=D — Greek delta Δ/δ is a hard TH like … well, like the Nordic Ð more than anything. So when they imported words with an English D, they represent it with NT (ντ). That makes for some funny translation stuff — there was a place on Lefkada called “Valedine’s” because someone had changed the “NT” to a “D.”
