Re: Graeca sine flexione

On May 4, 2007, at 12:41 PM, Alex Fink wrote:

> 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.
I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Americanist_phonetic_notation (boo!). If it's to be believed,
American notation uses hacek and dot for /ts`)/ and /dz`)/ -- but
oddly does not use both for /s`/ and /z`/.

> 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.
I never realized the Americanist system did that... that in itself
seems pretty counterintuitive to me.