Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

At 1:05 am -0600 25/1/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 10:28:43PM +0000, Raymond Brown wrote:
>> It was changed because in Vulgar Latin they 'dropped their aitches', i.e.
>> /h/ became silent.  This meant the names of the letters A and H were the
>> same!  It seems they tried to keep the /h/ going medially as /ah(h)a/, but
>> /akka/ was what they said.
>
>I've been told that <h> is sometimes pronounced [k] in church Latin, e.g.
><mihi> [miki].
Correct - and _nihil_ is /nikil/ in Church Latin.  Indeed, in medieval
texts they often spelled _michi_ and _nichil_ respectively.  But normally
the {h} is silent, tho anglophones (and, I guess others) often "restore"
it, so to speak.

>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    :)

I suspect the /kk/ in Late Latin _acca_ was a reflex of /axa/. The Scots
word _loch_ /lOx/ is commonly pronounced /lOk/ in England.
Even more strange is the pronunciation used by some in England when
attempting to pronounce the Welsh lateral fricative {ll}; they 'hear'
(incorrectly) it as /xl/ and say [kl] !

[....]
>
>* 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   :)

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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