Re: Ancient Greek Phonology

Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
> Obviously, this is not a symmetrical vowel system. What's up with that?
> Why's there no /u/ or /o/?
According to the article on Greek in The World's Major Languages,
Ancient (Attic) Greek had the following monophthongs (some of these were
indicated by digraphs):

i i: y y:
e e:         o o:
E:             O:
       a a:

However, in another section, it gives the pronunciations of the letters,
and there is no short /e/, but is a short /E/.  At any rate, it does
seem asymmetrical

And diphthongs:
      eu   yi    e:i    e:u
ai    au         a:i    a:u
oi               o:i

The long diphthongs being rare, and, early on, e:i, a:i, and o:i lost
their off-glides to become e:, a:, and o:

> Also, how come /y/ 'y
> psilon' has been rendered as either 'y' or 'u' in English (and probably
> Latin)?
Well, the Romans borrowed the letter ypsilon to render the sound /y/ of
Greek words (of course, even earlier, they'd gotten <v> from ypsilon,
via a dialect that hadn't fronted /u/).  I'm not sure why <u> is often
used.

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