Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

John Cowan wrote:
>r
>/Ar/ (mysterious change in vowel)
As I recall, there was a sound change in English from /er/ to /ar/, but
it seems to me it never became universal, being more frequent in British
speech than in American. Examples: <clerk> pronounced with /r=/ in America,
something like /A:/ in Britain, like <Clark>; likewise <darby>; words with
/ar/ or /A:/ on both sides of the Atlantic include <sergeant> and doubtless
more I'm not thinking of. Anyway, I assume that happened with the name of
the letter R.

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>The usual story, which Nik also surmises, is that the Etruscans had
>3 velar stop phonemes, or at least were sensitive to the distinction
>between the realizations of /k/ in /ki-/, /ka-/, and /ko-/ --- so
>they used gamma, kappa and qoph (Greek qoppa?) for the three sounds.
>(Gamma for fronted /k/ since they didn't have (or write) voiced velar
>stops, and the unvoiced velars in the Greek source alphabet matched the
>other /k/s better).
In fact, in very old Latin inscriptions you find <C> only before <E> and
<I>, <K> before <A>, and <Q> before <O> and <U>. Although that system was
later abandoned in favor of <C> in most positions, a few /ka/ words appear
much more frequently with <K> in later Latin, including <kalendae> and (IIRC)
<Karthago>, and the digraph <QU> continues even to this day.

[...]
>> h
>> /ejtS/
>
>German and Scandinavian have names for this letter very similar to
>the ones for k, i.e., as if descended from /ha:/. But it may be a
>post-Roman analogical formation.
>
>The French have /aS/, I suspect they inflicted it on the English
>too.
and Danny Wier wrote:
>A quick question: how did the letter H get to be known as "aitch"
>(French and Spanish _ache_, both of course being pronounced differently?
The _American Heritage Dictionary_, Third Edition, gives an explanation. (I
noticed it's not under <aitch>, but is listed on the first page of the H
section.) Apparently, the Latin name was <ha>, which somehow and for some
reason was changed later to <ah>, also spelled <ach> (perhaps it was more
/ak/ or /ax/ than /ah/?) Supposedly, the French <hache> (and I presume the
Spanish cognate /atSe/ of the same spelling) came from this <ach>, and let
to <eitS> by regular sound changes.

Lars Henrik Mathiesen also wrote:
>> y
>> /wai/
>
>Now this is a mystery. I assume the Romans called it ypsilon; French
>uses i-grec.
According to the aforementioned AHD, one name for it in Latin was in fact <y
graeca>, but there was also the name <vi>/<ui>, sygnifying the union of the
shapes of the letters <I> and <V>. I'd be curious to know where the AHD got
this information...

--
Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo