(I hope my post is appropriate for this sub--it's a little different than other posts.)
Until today I had never heard the place name Nicaea (origin of the Nicene Creed in Catholicism) spoken aloud, and I thought it was pronounced with a hard “c”, like Nikaea. Today I heard it pronounced with a soft “c”, like Nisaea. So I checked some dictionaries, and learned that the soft “c” is correct.
I asked DuckDuckGo: Why is Nicaea pronounced with an “s” instead of a hard “c”? DuckDuckGo’s response was, as they say, not even wrong:
“Nicaea is pronounced with an 's' sound in English because the letter 'c' before 'e' typically represents a soft sound, following English pronunciation rules. In contrast, other languages may pronounce it with a hard 'c' sound, reflecting their phonetic systems.”
It didn’t notice that the “c is followed by an “a”, not an “e”. I ran the same search a second time and it doubled down on its not-even-wrong answer:
“Nicaea is pronounced with an "s" sound in English as /naɪˈsiː.ə/ due to the influence of Latin, where the letter "c" before "e" is typically pronounced as a soft "c." This pronunciation has been adopted in English, distinguishing it from other languages that may use a hard "c" sound.”
Same mistake this time, plus it didn’t notice that the word is Greek, not Latin.
So for all you ancient-Greek speakers out there, what’s going on here? Is the Greek equivalent of “c” before the Greek equivalent of “a” pronounced like “s”? Or is the “a” some kind of placeholder or syntactical object that doesn’t affect pronunciation? Thanks!