Homo: same spelling, different pronunciation (Homo sapiens and Homosexual)

People are adamant that the Os in ‘Homo sapiens’ and in ‘homosexual’ are pronounced the same (like the O in ‘oats’) because ‘homo’ is the same word. It’s people’s reasoning behind this that frustrates me, not how people pronounce things.

Yet the ‘homo’ in Homo sapiens and homosexual are different words with different meanings and pronunciations. The Os in ‘homosexual’ are more accurately pronounced like the O in ‘dot’. (A word is defined by its meaning, not its spelling or pronunciation.)

People easily accept that accents of the same language pronounce the same word in different ways. Why, then, is it so hard to believe that two different words from two different languages were pronounced differently? Recognise that the two words can be, and authentically were, pronounced differently. Dismiss the faulty reasoning.

Homo sapiens is the species name for humans and is based on two Latin words. The first, ‘homo’, means ‘human’ and the second, ‘sapiens’ means ‘wise’.

Homosexual originates from the Greek ‘homos’ (meaning ‘same’) and the Latin-derived ‘sexual’ (to mean sexual attraction). The latter is a combination of ‘-ual’, a common suffix to denote pertaining to (like factual, perceptual) and the Latin ‘sexus’ (‘copulation’), so in this case ‘pertaining to copulation’.