Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 09:56:55PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
> At 1:05 am -0600 25/1/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> >My classicist friend says that <h> in at least *some* words was
> >probably actually [?] early on, and [k] would be an approximation of the
> >glottal stop in a language lacking it. In addition, I've noticed that
> >"annihilate" in Spanish is in fact <aniquilar> /aniki"lar/!
>
> I rather doubt it, actually.  I'm sure what happened in spoken Latin is
> exactly what happened in some of the ancient Greek dialects and eventually
> became the norm in standard Greek, and has happened in many of the spoken
> dialects of England and south Wales, i.e. /h/ simply became silent    :)
Well yes, in the spoken Latin that led to the Romance languages, but this
doesn't explain how it became /k/ in Church Latin or in <aniquilar>. So
the question still remains: where would the /k/ come from?

> I suspect the /kk/ in Late Latin _acca_ was a reflex of /axa/.
Which would mean intervocalic /h/ > /x/ in some varieties, and then /x/ >
/k/. It sounds possible...

> >* The English used by Malory was full of <y> where we would today write <i>.
> >Oddly, I find the letter kind of ugly if used immoderately, and would prefer
> >for aesthetic reasons replacing most <y>s with <i>, but it seems Malory's
> >taste prefered the opposite.
>
> But then Mallory wrote "Le Morte d'Arthur" which must cause you to wince a
> little.  I remember many years ago my younger son's French pen-friend
> getting very upset when he saw the title of Mallory's book, calling him an
> 'ignoramus' and worse   :)
Not knowing French, that title has never looked at all objectionable to me,
but now I suppose that <morte> should be feminine, as it is in Spanish.
Also, in the text we're reading, that title shows up in other odd-looking
forms, such as <Le Morte Arthur> and <Le Morte Darthur>.

As for John Cowan's "mountaines of Yce," I will hastily add that I do like
words that begin with vocalic <y>. This occurred to me last night after I
sent my other message.

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo