Re: E and e (was: A break in the evils of English (or, Sturnan is beautiful))

At 8:38 am -0400 3/5/02, Christopher B Wright wrote:
>Tristan sekalge:
>>> It's Greek /xris"tos a"nesti/  - it's the greeting Greeks give one
>another
>>> at Eastertide.  It means "Christ is risen".  The reply is /a"nesti
>ali"Tos/
>>> "He is truly risen".  The / / enclose phonemic values; the Greek I've
>heard
>>> pronounce /e/ and /o/ are rather lower and closer to [E] and [O].
>>
>>That'd be an odd transliteration, wouldn't it?
>
>An attempt at writing Greek letters with the most similar Latin symbols,
>I'd say, but then regularized.
Then you'd say wrong.

>........Without that last, it would be "XRICTOS"
>rather than "XRICTOC".
No it would not.  The practice of writing sigma a different way at the end
of a word from the way it's written elsewhere is confined to the current
_lower case_ script only.  It has _never_ been a feature of upper case
script.  It would, in fact, be quite incorrect to write XRICTOS - the last
letter is Roman, not Greek.

I've only just noticed that I had R and not P as second letter  :=(
I'm surprised that no one had noticed before.  My apologies.

It was meant to be an attempt at writing Greek in *Greek* letters - the
only thing I slipped up on was the 'rho'.

'C' is not an uncommon way of writing sigma, that, after all, is where the
Cyrillic 'C' = /s/ comes from.  It was meant - and now is - pure Greek.

But I'd understood Tristan to be referring to /xris"tos a"nesti/ , which is
not a transliteration - it's the phonemic rendering of the Byzantine &
modern way of saying it.




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   XPICTOC ANECTH
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