Re: Carthage?

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 02:25 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>> ** Latin _Carthaginienses_ referred either to the inhabitants of _Nouua
>> Carthago_ (New Carthage) in Spain
>
> Shouldn't that be "Noua Carthago" with only one 'u'?
Yes.

> Also, is it known what the 'th' is doing in _Carthago_? An aspirate? A
> cluster?
I guess educated Romans pronounced it [t_h] or even [th] (if they were
careful), but the common pronunciation of the Classical & post-Classical
is more likely to have been [t]. Earlier spellings were in fact _Kartago_
and _Karthago_. The Greek version of the name was _Karkhe:do:n_. I imagine
the Doric (and original) form would have been _Karkha:do:n_ but AFAIK it
is not actually attested. There seems to have been a metathesis of dental~
velar sound in the Latin & Greek versions.

Both the Latin & the Greek names were of course ultimately derived from
the Punic name which simply meant "new city" (nea polis) which I think is
something like q-r-t H-d-S-t (hopefully Steg and/or Isaac will put me
right  :)

"istam urbem Carthadam Elissa dixit, quod Phoenicum ore exprimit Ciuitatem
Nouam"
(Elissa [Dido] called this town 'Carthada', which in the speech of the
Phoenicians expresses 'New City')
Gaius Julius Solinus - gammarian of the mid 3rd cent CE

The observant will doubtless notice some words have changed their meanings
a little since the Classical period (1st centuries BCE & CE       :)

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Wow - I didn't even have wait!

On Tuesday, November 30, 2004, at 05:44 , Steg Belsky wrote:
[snip]
> I don't know how the Romans pronounced it, but it seems to have
> originally been a cluster, something like */k>art X\adaSt/ "new city",
> cognate to Hebrew /k>eret X\adaSa/.
Thanks.

So it would seem that the Latin _th_ was for /tX\/ - it would still be
pronounced as I said above.

It looks as tho the assimilation has occurred in the Greek: /tX\/ --> */kX\
/ --> /kh/. But it does suggest I was right about the earlier Greek form
being _Karka:do:n_. They seem to have given up on -aSt. But why they
substituted -o:n I doubt even Zeus & Olympians knew. The Latin name I
suspect is a conflation of Punic, Greek & confusion   :)

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]