Re: Goblin phonology
| From: | Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, August 13, 1999, 0:23 |
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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".
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)
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