Re: OT: "Yugoslavia" in Greek

On Nov 10, 2007 5:14 AM,  <MorphemeAddict@...> wrote:
> So to modern Greeks there is a sound there, audible as a gamma
Careful -- what do you think "a gamma" means?

You could write it as /g/ if you wanted (especially under the approach
that phone_m_ic transcriptions often use undecorated letters, e.g. /r/
for English rather than /r\`/ or whatever, whenever there is no
obvious phoneme with which that "underspecified" representation could
conflict), but the realisations in modern Greek are [G] before back
vowels and [j\] before front ones.

Hence "Giou" = [j\u], which is the closest you can get in Greek to
[ju]. ("Iou" would tend to be [iu] rather than [ju].)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>