Re: lacruma etc (was: Y not?)

On Wednesday, January 26, 2005, at 10:55 , Muke Tever wrote:

> Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, at 10:48 , Muke Tever wrote:
>>>                               Sihler suggests it was a schwa,
>>> which might sensibly assimilate to a 'u' spelling with a following
>>> labial.  I kind of agree -- given that, to me, half an H is a perfectly
>>> sensible way of spelling it (especially given what the Greeks used it
>>> for).
>>
>> At the time of Claudius the Greek H was pronounced [e:], which is IMO not
>> much like [@]. I think the Claudian letter was simply I with small
>> horizontal bar added to show the modification of the vowel.
>
> I meant the earlier development, where Greek H was split into smooth
> breathing and the rough breathing [h], which latter is what I was
> thinking of.
The Greek diacritics were the invention of Alexandrian grammarians of the
late 3rd cent or early 2nd cent BCE (they were according to tradition
invented by Aristophanes of Byzantion). They are never found on ancient
inscriptions and only sporadically in literary papyrus manuscripts; they
are not found in papyri of a private nature. It is not until the 3rd cent
CE that they are regularly used in literary texts and not till the 7th
cent CE that they seem to have become normal in all texts. I suspect
Claudius knew of diacritics; I suspect that at that time their main use
was in teaching Greek to non-L1 Greek speakers - much in the same way that
Russian texts are often printed with acute accent over the stressed vowel
in texts for foreign learners. But I doubt that he know of their origins.
Since......

>  It is at least precedent for splitting an H to represent
> a special and perhaps less-substantial sound (whether Claudius knew
> about the breathings' origin or not).
It is still in fact a matter of controversy whether the 'soft breathing'
did develop from the right half of the H.

When, through the influence of Athens, the eastern Ionian alphabet became
generally accepted throughout the Greek speaking world, some of the cities
that retained the sound [h] did use the "half H" |- symbol for the sound.
Claudius was a great antiquarian - he wrote a grammar of Etruscan which,
regretfully, is now lost - and may well have know this symbol. His use of
inverted F was based on the use of F (the so-called 'digamma') for /w/ in
some of the earlier Greek dialects, so I think it is quite plausible that
knew the sign |- (which, of course,should have no gap between the vertical
and horizontal bars).

I notice Unicode does include the Greek F (uppercase U+03DC, lowrcase
U+03DD), but it does not seem to include |-

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

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