> 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].