The origin of the Bosphorus name, the important strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, is quite interesting. Originally in Ancient Greek, it was Bosporos without the sound of f. However, when it was borrowed into Medieval Latin, it seems that the p was mistakenly thought to be aspirated. As aspirated p‘s were written and pronounced as ph, that’s how it got transcribed. The name had a mythological origin in Ancient Greek, meaning “cow passage” because of the story of Io, a woman turned into a cow and stung by flies until she crossed the strait. Eventually, bosporus became a general term for “strait” in Ancient Greek and was also used for the waterway connecting the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.
