On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 18:05:19 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:
>At 2:21 pm -0500 25/6/01, Danny Wier wrote:
>>From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>
>>
>>| En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:
>>
>>| > French: nasal front mid-low rounded vowel [oe~]
>>|
>>| And don't forget the dreaded /H/ (inverted lowercase h, the
non-vocalic
>>| equivalent of /y/) which exists in only a handful of languages all
over the
>>| world.
>>
>>That is also found in Abkhaz, and it was in Classical Greek (_huios_
>>"son", for
>>example).
>
>On what evidence?
>
>As all other diphthongs were falling diphthongs in ancient Greek, I
would
>have thought [yj] is much more likely. Inscriptions show that from the
the
>6th cent. BC onwards the diphthong tends to monophthongize to written
plain
>upsilon; this surely makes more sense if it was [yj] >> [y:], rather
than
>[Hi] >> [y:]?
>
I agree. A better example would have been the word for gospel, which
may have been pronounced [eHaNge_Hlion]... though there's some dispute
as to whether the upilon was pronounced as [H] or [w] when used as an
offglide...
Justin
>Ray.
>
>=========================================
>A mind which thinks at its own expense
>will always interfere with language.
> [J.G. Hamann 1760]
>=========================================