Hello Brew Hoop and welcome to Greek Freakology.

In this series I leverage

my Greek nationality my upbringing in Thessaloniki, Greece my current residence in Athens, Greece my Big Fat Greek Wedding

in order to give you insight to Giannis' background.

Greek Freakology Chapter 1 starts with the name.

Giannis' parents emigrated from Nigeria to Greece in the early 1990s. For their 4 children that were born in Greece, they chose 4 Greek names: Θανάσης, Γιάννης, Κώστας, Αλέξης. (Thanasis, Giannis, Kostas, Alexis)

Hey, what did I just do here? I turned Θανάσης into Thanasis... How?

Well, let's start with the basics.

Modern Greek uses a 24 letter alphabet from alpha to omega.

This alphabet is different than the latin/roman one used by the English language. So, there comes a point were a conversion is needed. How is it done?

Well, take a deep breath and read all about it in the detailed wikipedia entry titled "Romanization of Greek" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Greek

If you get dizzy reading this page and you have a time machine handy, try going back to the time when the Romans were invading Greece and used the LEGION to defeat the PHALANX. It's really just X's and O's. Find a Greek general nearby and give him all the legion tactical system playbook.

Anyway, enough with this silliness, let's get back to a real life scenario.

You are 5 years old and your name is Γιάννης Ζορμπάς. You want to go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. In order to get on a flight, you need an identification document, a passport. To get one, you need to go to your local police station and present a number of documents, some photos and fill in an application form.

It is in that application form that you are asked to enter your name in latin/roman letters. How do you do that?

There are 2 approaches here:

The issuing office does the conversion for you. You do the conversion yourself.

Approach number 2 is a recent one. Approach number 1 was the default for quite a long time.

Approach number 1 has some weaknesses.

Do you believe that the issuing authority employees specialized linguists that make the conversion based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Greek?

No, they don't. What is/was used is/was a simple 'Search-and-replace', 'letter-by-letter' conversion mapping.

For our Example:

Γιάννης Ζορμπάς

Γ --> G

ι --> i

ά --> a

ν --> n

ν --> n

η --> i

ς --> s

Ζ --> Z

ο --> o

ρ --> r

μ --> m

π --> p

ά --> a

ς --> s

So your name gets converted from Γιάννης Ζορμπάς to Giannis Zormpas and have a nice flight.



But WAIT. Why is it Giannis and not Yannis? Why not "Yanni" like this guy?

Why is it Zormpas and not Zorbas? Why not "Zorba" like this guy?

Gianni? Giannis? Yanni? Yannis? Zompas? Zompa? Zorba? Zorbas?

Quite tough. And it gets tougher if your surname isn't Ζορμπάς but Αντετοκούνμπο instead.

But hold on, Αντετοκούνμπο isn't Greek, it's Nigerian and it is spelled Adetokunbo and according to this source means" the crown came from over the sea" in Yoruba.

So why convert Adetokunbo to Αντετοκούνμπο and then to Antetokounmpo?

Why?

Well, I will use Occam's razor here and give you this as the simplest explanation: When it was time to fill in the passport application, the person filling in the form simply chose the 'simple' 'search-and-replace' 'letter-by-letter' method. No particular effort and/or thinking was spent here, as Giannis had NO PAPERS for the entirety of his life. A passport was a like 'a dream come true' so a potential less-than-ideal spelling was, in comparison, of trivial importance.

So, yes.

TL;DR ?

Giannis Antetokounmpo is spelled as such because one of these guys chose the spelling.