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Re: OT: "Yugoslavia" in Greek

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Saturday, November 10, 2007, 4:28
MorphemeAddict@WMCONNECT.COM wrote:
> Can anyone here tell me why the Greek name for Yugoslavia (Giougkoslavía) > starts with a gamma? It seems to me that the iota would start the word at least > as well, and there is no hint of a 'g' in the source "yugo-" (south). > > stevo </HTML>
Greek gamma in modern Greek is like that Minza phoneme that I was struggling to find a way to represent in the Latin alphabet -- it has a [j\] allophone before /i/ (as in the word "gyros"). I'd probably do the same in Minza: Ðiugóslavia. "Iu" by itself would be pronounced as a falling diphthong [iw]. At least with the initial consonant it's [j\iw], which is about as close as you can get in Minza.