Re: Graeca sine flexione

On 5/4/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Although for something called 'X sine flexione' I would probably have
> used Old rather than Modern language as a basis but that is just
> personal preference.
Yes, that seemed to be the consensus in the threads back in last
February, as well.

However, Modern is what I'm more familiar with and what I have
dictionaries for, so I'm biassed :)

> E.g. I liked the careful selection of analytical forms.
Thank you!

> 'hagiasthêto' ~ 'as ajasi' is very nicely crafted.
'as ajasi thi', actually, since it's passive. (The "thi" particle
obviously from the common ending on the aparemphato form of passives.)

> What is Modern Greek for this?
"As agiasteí".

> > > What's funny is that it seems in the era of Unicode and nice fonts
> > > that have uniform faces for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, conlangers
> > > start to use mixed orthographies.  I like this a lot
> >
> > Indeed. I'd even go so far as to recommend it where appropriate for
> > added  realism and/or spice.
>
> Yes!  And it leads to the need for strange decisions sometimes: due to
> the (unfortunate, from the conlangers view) coincidence of capital
> letters where the small letters are different, it is sometimes hard to
> decide from which alphabet to use some character.  Examples are:
>
>    - Greek nu,    where the capital coincides with Latin N
>    - Greek mu,    where the capital coincides with Latin M
>    - Greek eta,   where the capital coincides with Latin H
>    - Greek gamma, where the capital coincides with Cyrillic g
I had that last one, since I wanted something for /g/!

Originally, I had the Latin orthography and the Greek orthography both
use Latin |b d g| for voiced stops and Greek |beta delta gamma; phi
theta chi| for fricatives (with the result that both orthographies
looked very similar) -- but then I had the problem that capital beta
and capital bee looked the same.

So I imported the capital form of Cyrillic Beh, and later decided I'd
just go with Cyrillic characters all the way. And later did away with
Greek letters for fricatives in the Latin-based orthography and
decided to use |v f| after all from the Latin alphabet.

But since Cyrillic, which I turned to for voiced stops in the
Greek-based orthography, has a capital Geh that looks like a capital
Greek gamma, I went with the Ukrainian variant with the upturn.


On 5/4/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> Eric Christopherson wrote:
> [snip]
>  > I read the original mailing list thread, and noticed that it said  that
>  > /se/ and /kse/ in Modern Greek correspond to /es/ (or /eis/)  and /eks/
>  > in Ancient Greek. Do those result from metathesis,
>
> Metathesis
I can imagine that augment might have had something to do with it as well.

/kse/ in Modern Greek is a bound morpheme, not a free one as in ancient.

And since verbs in ekXXX form their past (with augment) in ekseXXX, I
think that ekblabla (base) -> ekseblabla (past, with internal augment)
-> kseblabla (aphaeresis?) could be part of the influence as well.

After all, lopping off the first (unstressed) vowel is not that
uncommon, see e.g. ospition -> spiti; imera -> mera; opsarion ->
psari; etc. etc.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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