Re: Byzantine Greek

At 3:47 pm -0500 24/4/02, Peter Clark wrote:
>        Since Enamyn's pronunciation is known only through a couple of Enamyn
>phrases written in both Greek letters and Enamyn letters, it makes sense that
>I should try to pin down what Greek letters would have been used around the
>8th or 9th century A.D. to transcribe Enamyn.
>        The vowels are somewhat easy, I just need to make sure that I am
>using the
>right ones for the time period. /a/ = alpha, /E/ = eta,
eta = [E:] belongs to 5th century (and earlier) BC.  It had already become
/e:/ by the Roman period, and probably as early as 2nd cent. BC.  By the
Byzantine period it was the same as iota, i.e. /i/

/i/ = iota, /O/ =
>omega (or omicron?),
omega = [O:] belongs to the 4th cent. BC.   By the Roman period omega &
omicron were phonemically /o:/ and /o/ respectively, and by the Byzantine
period, they were identical, i.e. phonemically /o/ but probably lower than
[o] and more like [O], i.e. like in Modern Greek.

/M/ (unrounded /u/) = ? For /M/ I think I'll need a
>digraph, like omicron-upsilon.
omicron-upsilon became [u:] by the 4th cent. BC and has remained [u(:)]
ever since.

I don't know how Byzantine Greeks would've represented [M]; but if
Cyrillic, which was basically an adaptation of the current Greek alphabet,
is anything to go by they'd probably have invented a symbol for it.
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At 5:27 pm -0400 24/4/02, John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
>>         Although as I understand it, delta was once pronounced /D/.
>>Would it have
>> been pronounced /d/ by the 8th century?
T'other way round!

>Originally beta and delta were [b] and [d], and so it was when the Latin
>script developed from the Greek one.  Then they became [B] > [v] and
>[D], and so remained.  This was true when Cyrillic developed from Greek.
Yep.

>Cyrillic uses a variant of beta for [b]; the Greeks, when they needed
>[b], wrote it with the digraph mu-pi, and still do.  Similarly, Greek [d] is
>written nu-tau.
Yep - and [g] was and is written gamma-kappa.

At the same time (late Roman period) that [b] > [v] and [d] > [D], [g] >
[G] or, before front vowels, [j].  So it was by the 8th cent. AD and it
still is so.

>Coptic, yet a third derivative of Greek, uses a letter adapted from
>Egyptian Demotic script for [S].  Greeks typically mapped [S] to /s/
>and wrote it with sigma (as in Iesous < Yehoshua).  Cyrillic adopted
>the Hebrew shin for [S].
Yep.

>I don't know of any Greek-derived script with a letter for [L].  Nor I -
>but lambda is [L] before front vowels, so I'd guess they'd just write
>lambda-iota.  The problem then would be if you wanted expressly to show
>non-palatalized [l] before a front vowel.
>[j] has always been written with iota.
Not so - it is also written gamma before front vowels; gamma-iota before
another vowel is also now just [j].

Ray.



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