Re: Ancient Greek Phonology

At 10:18 pm -0400 18/9/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>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)
(Attic) is important.  It's pretty obvious that there was no standard
ancient Greek pronunciation any more than there was a standard ancient
Greek alphabet or a standard ancient Greek orthography.

Most of our literature from the 6th & 5th cents BC happen to be written in
the Attic dialect.  But some important texts were not; Herodotos, e.g.
wrote in the eastern Ionian dialect (or at least a literary form of it) and
the works of Homer are in an artificial Epic dialect (con-dialect?); the
surviving fragments of Sappho are in Aeolic etc, etc.

It wasn't till the Alexandrian conquests "internationalized" Greek & the
Koine developed that a standard pronunciation developed.  Even then, in the
Greek homeland, ancient dialect pronunciations lingered on.  The modern
Tsakonian, e.g. seems to be derive from a Doric, heavily contaminated by
the Koine, which survived in southern Greece.

>Greek had the following monophthongs (some of these were
>indicated by digraphs):
>
>i i: y y:
>e e:         o o:
>E:             O:
>       a a:
Possibly  ;)

>However, in another section, it gives the pronunciations of the letters,
>and there is no short /e/, but is a short /E/.
i.e. we simply do not know the details (and anyone who claims to do so is
either naive or deluded IMHO)

At any rate, it does
>seem asymmetrical
>
>And diphthongs:
>      eu   yi    e:i    e:u
>ai    au         a:i    a:u
>oi               o:i
There was also o:u

[....]
>> 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.
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_.  But in the Classical period the way upsilon was represented is
consistent and reflected Koine pronunciation:
(1) as _y_ if it was a monophthong, i.e. if following a consonant. (Initial
_y_ is not found in Koine Greek; it was always preceeded by h_);
(2) as _u_ if it occurred as the second element of a true diphthong, i.e.
au, eu.
(3) the digraph OY (omicron upsilon), which was pronounced [u:] in the
Koine, is transcribed simply as _u_ (not _ou_).

This threefold division still survives in modern Greek, thus:
(1) the sound in Koine was /y/ or /y:/; in the modern language it is /i/
(modern Greek has lost phonemic vowel length);
(2) AY, EY and HY are now /av/, /ev/ and /iv/ or /af/, /ef/, /if/ depending
upon whether the following sound is voiced or not;
(3) OY continues to be /u/.

Back to the ancient vowels.
Early Greek certainly had a similar system to Latin, i.e.
/i/  /i:/        /u/  /u:/
  /e/  /e:/    /o/  /o:/
      /a/  /a:/

There were also many diphthongs: /ei/, /eu/, /ai/, /au/, /oi/, /ou/;
/e:i/, /e:u/, /a:i/, /a:u/, /o:i/, /o:u/  as well YI to make it
asymmetrical  :)

Changes:
(a) Mid vowels.
It seems that the long sounds were more lax or open than the short ones,
i.e. /e:/ was [E:].  At any rate, secondary high, long mid vowels developed
with Greek, e.g. -ens --> -e:s.  It seems also that /ei/ and /ou/ tended
towards monophthongs at an early date.

Some dialects continued to write /e/, [e:] and [E:] as E, and /o/, [o:] and
[O:] as O. (I'm not committing myself on the exact quality of the short
vowel :)

In Ionia, however, where clearly [ei] and [e:] had fallen together at an
early date, and likewise [ou] and [o:] had fallen together, we find the
following conventions adopted:

  SHORT         LONG HIGH       LONG LOW
    E            EI [e:]         H [E:]
    O            OY [o:]         ‡ [O:]

This was adopted sometime during the 5th cent. by the Athenians and
eventually became the part of the Greek Koine (with modified
pronunciations).

(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.

Oh dear - I'm running out of time.   The diphthongs will have to wait till
this evening  :)

Ray.



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