Re: Byzantine Greek

Quoting Danny Wier <dawier@...>:
> If you have a vowel /u/ the |ou| ligature would be more practical, but I'd
> just use upsilon for an unrounded variant, even though by medieval times
> the
> pronunciation of upsilon already merged with iota *I think*.
    Well, I want to use the letter that was closest in pronunciation to the
Enamyn sound; using just upsilon would have implied that the letter was either
[y] or [i]. But if |ou| (omicron-upsilon) would have been understood as [u],
then that's close enough to [M] for my purposes. I haven't quite figured out
what the nature of this document is (perhaps a list of Enamyn cities in Khazar-
controlled Crimea that the Byzantine cities traded with, or maybe a merchant's
guide to essential Enamyn words, or something of that ilk), but it is essential
that the ninth-century Byzantine would have been able to look at the Greek
letters and give a reasonably close pronunciation of the Enamyn word.

> For /j/: Unicode includes a "j" letter for the Greek code, or just use
> iota.
    I guess iota it is. It shouldn't be too difficult for modern scholars to
hypothesize the existance of /j/, given that vowels are written as vowel
points, while consonants are regular letters.

> For /K/: I'm thinking either a double lambda (analogous to Welsh), or
> lambda
> with a reversed apostrophe above it, using the same convention as aspirate
> "rh" rho. Tau-lambda is another option, but misleadning.
    Tau-lambda would be my first choice; if I am not mistaken, the various
accent marks and apostrophes would have been just coming into existance at that
point (or was it even later?) and in any case, probably would not have been
understood, let alone used, by most (literate) Byzantines.

> For /b/: double beta, for /v/, single beta. Or mu-pi for /b/, like modern
> Greek does. Or even add the Cyrillic.
    Another site confirmed mu-pi, so that takes care of /b/. Beta can
represent /v/. (And Cyrillic wasn't even invented at this point. Well, I guess
Cyrill and his brother (M-something, too lazy to look him up) would have been
in Moldovia at this point, but still too early for Cyrillic proper.

> For /S/: double sigma, sigma-kappa(-iota) (analogous to Italian), or use
> the
> Coptic or Cyrillic addition.
    Would a Coptic letter have been understood? I'm guessing probably not.
Sigma-kappa is tempting, though.

> For /ts/: tau-sigma. For /tS/... this one is a tough one, kappa-iota maybe,
> or tau-sigma-sigma (I hate trigraphs), or double kappa, or use the Coptic
> or
> Cyrillic letter.
    Or maybe tau-sigma-kappa, analogous to the above? I don't mind trigraphs,
the purpose of this is just to give modern scholars a fairly good base to
reconstruct Enamyn phonology. :)
    Thanks for your input,
    :Peter

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