Re: Conscripts 101

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 23:11:37 -0400, Alex Fink <a4pq1injbok_0@...> wrote:
>What I do know of precedent for is this sort of thing happening when a
>script gets borrowed: certain words remain written as they were in the
>source language, despite being pronounced entirely differently.  Cuneiform
>scripts did this all the time, but weren't originally phone*ic; a closer
>parallel is Pahlavi, which was an abjad, and retained a number of Aramaic
>spellings (e.g. 'king' was written |MLKA| as in Aramaic, but still
>pronounced _shah_).
btw, http://www.ancientscripts.com/pahlavi.html calls these "xenographs",
but it's not a term I've heard elsewhere, and googling it doesn't reveal any
other linguistic uses in the first few pages.

[...]
> Their positions and shapes correspond to
>  zayin, samekh, s.ade, shin, (appended to the end as a new letter)
>but their names to
>  s.ade (?), (a systematic name from its sound), shin, samekh, (Greek "like
>pi" ?).
Should have said, re zeta, that its name is as likely to be by analogy from
eta and theta than from another sibilant letter, but I've heard both theories.

Alex

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