Ancient Greek Phonology, now with added obConlang!

> From:    Vasiliy Chernov <bc_@...>
> Subject: Re: Ancient Greek Phonology
>
> As stated above, omicron formerly denoted a rather narrow vowel. Its long
> counterpart, <ou>, had been narrowed to [u:]. And some loans in
neighboring
> languages do have [u] for omicron. On the other hand, short vowels were
> probably 'lax' compared to the long ones. This allows (IMO) for a minor
> reinterpretation:
>
> i/I (iota)     (?) (upsilon)  U (omicron)
> e/E (epsilon)
>                 a (alpha)
Hmm...
This reminds me of my Hadwan's sytem, roughly from the same, ah, proximity
(is there a word for 'place _and_ time'?).

i (yudz)        y (ÿpsilon)  U (vau ~ omikron)
e (epsilon)
                a (alfa)

Later on /U/ differentiates to /u/ and /o/.  I suppose this could be caused
by symmetrificating... /e/ in this stage is very rare in native words (it
should only appear epenthetically before labials), but would appear in a lot
of loans.

Dan Seriff wrote:
>We've already seen what conflict can arise over the
>pronunciation of upsilon.
I get the idea that there wasn't really so much _a_ pronunciation of
upsilon.  In this last library book I had (I apparently copied all the
relevant bits out except the title!! 'an outline of the history of the greek
language' or something) it says that one part of the evidence for different
dialects in Koine were the different values of upsilon: ü, i, u, and
possibly even iu (I suppose that's /ju/ like English; there wasn't a
pronciguide).

     *Muke!
--
http://muke.twu.net/