Re: CHAT letter names (was: CHAT Etruscana etc)

 --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote: > On
Saturday, February 28, 2004, at 09:47 PM, Tristan
> McLeay wrote:
>
> >  --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> >> On Friday, February 27, 2004, at 11:50 AM, John
> >> Cowan wrote:
> >>> It's also strange to realize
> >>> that these letter-words have no standard
> spellings
> >> whatsoever, yet they
> >>> are standard words used (with the usual
> >> variations) in all dialects.
> >>
> >> Except 'zed'/'zee'   :)
> >
> > And haich/aich.
>
> No, no - that _is_ dialect variation or ideoloect
> variation.
Isn't that exactly what I said? I think I might be
confused?

...
> This became [atS@] in Old French and our name is
> borrowed from the Norman
> French. By normal sound changes it gives us our
> modern English /ejtS/, the
> Welsh 'aets' and modern French [aS].
Not everyone is familiar with Welsh orthography :) But
also, why is it that you use <j> in diphthongs? I
thought it was the British habit to use <i>? Are you
being too thoroughly influenced by the Americans on
the list or are both used in Britain for British
English? (I know the IPA says both are correct.)

...
>
=====================================================
> =============
> On Sunday, February 29, 2004, at 02:31 AM, John
> Cowan wrote:
>
> > Ray Brown scripsit:
> [snip]
>
> >> Except 'zed'/'zee'   :)
> >
> > Umm, yeah.  I wonder who invented "zee"?  "Zed" is
> obviously < "zeta",
> > so it must have been the older form.
>
> Yes, zed is ultimately from Greek /ze:ta/ via Latin
> and Old French. Z was
> originally part of the alphabet inherited from the
> Etruscans, being the
> seventh letter; if the Romans had retained it,
> presumably the name
> would've been *ez. But early and Classical Latin had
> no [z] sound, so the
> letter was dropped and replace by the new letter G,
> formed by adding a
> diacritic to C to denote the voiced sound.
So I've heard. Still strikes me as odd, though.
Etruscan had no [b] sound, but retained a b. (What did
Etruscan call the letters like b that they didn't
distinguish from p?)

> Later, the Romans began borrowing words from Greek
> and the letters Y and Z
> were also borrowed (or re-borrowed) and tacked onto
> the end with their
> current Greek names /hy:/ and /ze:ta/.  In Old
> French it was [zEd@]
> (modern zède) and was introduce as such to English.
/hy:/? When did ypsilon come about? Are there any
languages that continue (some reflex of) /hy:/? And
shouldn't [zEd@] have become 'zead' (/zi:d/) in
English? Or did the same thing happen to it as
happened to 'bread'?

> Old English did not have the phoneme /z/, the sound
> [z] being an allophone
> of /s/ in Old English. It seems many dialects had
> trouble with initial [z]
>   (it's not exactly common even in modern English)
> and the names 'izzet'
> and 'izzard' are recorded, but 'zed' has become
> standard in Britain.
Hehe, I like izzard :) I personally avoid zee mostly
on the grounds that it's too similar to cee. I would
be happier with ez/es; word-initial z sounds more like
s than word-final I think, no doubt relating to what
Ray said, but it's only really safe intervocalically.
(Partly too on grounds of anti-Americanism.*)

* Some might say that 'patriotism' would sound less
bad. To me, anti-Americanism is the lesser silliness.

> 'zee' seems to have been formed from dropping the
> [d@] of [zEd@], helped
> obviously by analogy with names of B, C, D etc. I
> believe it was attested
> as yet another variant here but has, of course,
> become standard in the US.
There are times when it's read as zee here (Au) (a
minority do it all the time, and of course the
American EZ (really stupidly Australianised as Ezy---I
don't know what's wrong with Easy, though) demands
it), but it's mostly zed, especially in 'NZ' (e.g. in
the ANZ bank). The American way of singing the
alphabet, I think, kinda requires zee, but another
version has come up when I was in grade six that works
just as well with zed as zee, but is used primarily on
the grounds that it doesn't trip up around elemenope
(my younger brother was for a while convinced there
was a letter men, f'rinstance).

--
Tristan.

--

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