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Hey! I remember my Greek mythology, and I thought the dog that guarded the entrance was called Cerberus! What gives?

April 26, 2017called Cerberus dog entrance Greek guarded mythology remember

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Hey! I remember my Greek mythology, and I thought the dog that guarded the entrance was called Cerberus! What gives?

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I personally wonder about this myself. I have seen references in “The Devil’s Dictionary” that claim it is Kerberos, but when I checked this myself I only found the “Cerberus” variant. I never actually heard of the “Kerberos” spelling/pronunciation until I got involved with Kerberos myself. From: Tom Yu “Cerberus” is the Latin spelling of the Greek “Kerberos”, and according to the OED is pronounced like “serberus”, but that is quite at odds with the Greek, as the initial consonant is a “k”. MIT Project Athena chose to use the Greek spelling and pronunciation. From: Jan Sacharuk Tom Yu is correct, Cerberus is the Latin spelling. However, the fact that the OED says that the ‘c’ is pronounced as an ‘s’ is an English affectation. In Latin, the letter ‘c’ is always hard. So Cerberus is pronounced ‘Ker-ber-ous’. The letter ‘u’ is also slightly different, making it somewhere in between ‘oos’ and ‘ous’. From: Michael A.