Re: Oops-silon (was: Rare Phonetics)

At 1:07 pm -0500 26/6/01, Justin Mansfield wrote:
>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:
[snip]
>>>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...
Is there?

I know of no evidence that the semivocalic part of the diphthongs shifted
from back rounded to front rounded when /u/ shifted to /y/.  Indeed, it is
noteworthy, I think, that in Ionia where the shift /u/ >> /y/ began, we
find spellings like _aotoi_ for _autoi_, _Glaokos_ for _Glaukos_,
_pheogeto:_ for _pheugeto:_ etc.  Clearly these scribes were felling
unconfortable using the new ysilon in these diphthongs and resorted to {ao}
= /aw/ etc.

Yet most Greeks came to accept {u} = /y/, but {au} = /aw/.  That the Romans
consistently (apart from early oral borrowings from Doric) wrote initial
and post-consonantal upsilon with {y}, but always wrote the diphthongs {au}
and {eu} and never as *{ay} or *{ey} surely is proof enough that the second
element was [w], not [H].

Also the Byzantine & modern Greek [v] surely suggest [w]; the early
spelling with wau (digamma) in those dialects certainly confirm the
earliest sound as [w].  Indeed, the confusions in spelling between -eud- &
-ebd- and between -aud- and -abd- as early as the 3rd cent. BC in Boitia
surely show that the shift towards the Byzantine pronunciation had already
begun by the Hellenistic period.

A shift of /aw/ >> /av/, I understand; a shift /aw/ >> /aH/ >> /av/ I find
more difficult and, indeed, find no evidence for it.

In short, I know of no evidence that [H] occurred in ancient Greek.

Ray.






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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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