Re: Ancient Greek Phonology

>From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
>Subject: Re: Ancient Greek Phonology
>Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 06:57:40 +0100
Thanks for the help guys :)

>The Romans did not know the ancient pronunciation.  The only pronunciation
>the knew was the Koine.  Some very early borrowings were made in speech
>through contact with Greeks in southern Italy where the Dorian settlements
>still pronounced upsilon as [u] or [u:]; thus we find 'Pyrrhos' rendered as
>_Burrus_.
Why with a 'b'? Didn't Romans and Greeks both pronounce 'b' as a voiced
bilabial?

>(b) Upsilon
>In Ionian and some other dialects, e.g. Boiotian & Attic, /u/ & /u:/
>shifted to /y/ and /y:/.    This left a gap, so to speak, at [u], which was
>early filled by OY which shifted from [o:] to [u:].   This became the
>standard Attic pronunciation which later formed the basis of the
>international Koine pronunciation.  But some dialects, noticeably Doric,
>hang onto older forms.
So, to summarize my interpretation of your answer (and that of the other
members):

- The asymmetry in the AG presented in my book is due to the
  phonological system being in a transition stage
- the transition was exclusive to one or a limited number of
  dialects (Attic and Boiotian mentioned)
- "standard" AG has been modelled on that or those dialect(s)
- the transitional asymmetry, and the phonological gaps it entailed,
  were soon to be "corrected" (by /oy/ becoming /u/ and more) in
  later Greek

Correct?
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