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Re: Goblin phonology

From:Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
Date:Friday, August 13, 1999, 0:23
On Thu, 12 Aug 1999 14:40:21 -0600 Ed Heil <edheil@...> writes:
>Oh, speaking of lack of glides.... > >The Greek alphabet had no Y or W (no mark representing [j] or [w] I >mean)... and of course it had no H ([h]) (though H could be indicated >by means of diacritic marks). So the Tetragrammaton was made up >entirely of letters which had no Greek equivalent! Though I >understand that it was still (irreverently) used in some Greek magical >formulas, in the forms "IAOUE", "IABE", and (most commonly) "IAO".
>Fun classical spelling trivia. >Ed Heil >.. edheil@postmark.net >.... http://edheil.iwarp.com
Well, i'm sort of incredulous at the idea of Hebrew _vav_ being [w], at least as far back as the first few CE centuries... In the Aramaic of the Jerusalem Talmud there are already alternative spellings using _bet_ /b/ [b v] in some places and _vav_ in others. That's what happens in the Hebrew alphabet when sounds get merged - it's possible to see looking from the earlier Biblical books through to the Talmud an increasing replacement of _ssin_ (descended from Proto-Semitic [s<lat>]) by _samekh_ [s]. People say that the Modern _vav_ [v] comes from Ashkenazim who lost the phoneme [w] by contact with [w]-less Germanic languages. But that doesn't make sense, since Syrians, from an Arabic-speaking area (and Arabic has [w]) also pronounce _vav_ as [v]. -Stephen (Steg) ___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.