Re: ?: Greek vowel systems (was Re: Tolkien & front rounded vowels

At 5:50 pm -0500 31/3/02, czhang23@aol.com wrote:
>Thank you so much for answering. Your efforts are so much appreciated. :)
You're welcome!
-----------------------------------------------
At 12:44 am -0600 1/4/02, Danny Wier wrote:
>From: "Raymond Brown" <ray.brown@...>
>
>| Oh dear, with various interruptions, it taken three days to do this -
>| probably been answered already by now  ;)
>
>It's okay, it's a great post because of it!
Thanks.

>| (b) long vowels
>|     -----------
>|   The early history is not quite as simple as the short ones, but there
>| appears to have developed in most dialects a seven vowel system thus:
>|                Phonemes            Graphemes
>|           /i:/          /u:/       {I}             {Y}
>|             /e:/       /o:/          {EI}       {OY}
>|               /E:/   /O:/               {H}  {?}
>|                  /a:/                     {A}
>
>? means Omega I presume? (I use W for "fake Greek" transliteration sometimes,
>since uncial omega resembles W.)
Oh, it wasn't a question mark when I wrote it.  On my Mac it was a lovely
capital omega {sigh}.  When 'transliterating' Greek in lower case {w} seems
to be commonly used. I was just trying to be clever, but I should've known
better with ASCII above #128.  Oh for Unicode!

[snip]
>
>I was thinking OI could've been [ø:] (o-slash), or another diphthong [øy], at
>some time, then went to [y]. And could AI have been [E:] or [æ:] (ash) as
>well?
All possible - we just don't know the details. Indeed, Ionian eta could
well have been [æ:] rather than [E:] if one recalls that early [a:] become
eta in Ionoan and, generally, Attic Greek.  On the coastal belt of
south-east Wales (where I spent 22 years of my like) RP [A:] is [æ:], so
the Anglophone native of Cardiff call their city ["k_h æ:dIf]   :)

Ray.

======================
   XRICTOC ANESTH
======================