Re: Graeca sine flexione

On Fri, 4 May 2007 14:57:00 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

>It would also be interesting to know what the dot below is and the
>hacek of {j}.  Some letters can be guessed from the vocab section,
>which gives pronunciation, not orthography.  Rotated e seems to be
>/@/.
My money's on retroflexion for dot below, and /dZ dz`/ for j hachek, j
hachek dot below.  From the vocab list we see that there's a contrast
between /s S s`/, which are presumably s, s hachek, s hachek dot below in
that order: Cyrillic sha gets used for s hachek in the Lord's Prayer
translation, and dot below is common to mark retroflexion, although the
redundant use of a hachek in this case too is peculiar.  So all of /s S s`
 z Z z`   ts tS ts`   dz dZ dz`/ probably exist.  j hachek = /dZ/ is a very
sensible thing to do given the English value of <j>, and this makes the
j-series fit nicely with the s-, z-, and c-series which are presumbly
voiceless frics, voiced frics, and voiceless affricates respectively, except
that I guess they found <j> /dz/ too counterintuitive and went for ezh
instead, as in the Americanist system.

Alex

Reply