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Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

From:Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 23, 2001, 2:10
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22 i686; en-US; m18) > Gecko/20001107 Netscape6/6.0 > X-Accept-Language: en > Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 14:29:43 -0500 > From: John Cowan <jcowan@...> > > It turns out that it was the Etruscans who gave the alphabet > letters their modern European names, breaking with the > Greek < Phoenician names alpha < alef, beta < bet, etc. > > Their convention was: > > 1) > Vowels were named after the vowel sound. > > 2) > Stop consonants were named by *suffixing* the stop with /e/. > > 3) > Sonorant consonants were named by *prefixing* the stop with /e/. > > This pattern is remarkably well preserved in Modern English, allowing > for vowel shortening in closed syllables, the change of /e/ to /i/ > in the Great Vowel Shift, and the softening of "c" and "g", which were > originally always /k/ and /g/. > > [...] > > c > /si/ > k > /kei/ (perhaps influenced by name of "j"?) > q > /kju/
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). Since they couldn't all three be called /ke:/, they broke the system slightly. The English names descend regularly from /ke:/, /ka:/ and /ku:/.
> 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.
> j > /dZei/
Other European languages use names derived from iota --- like English jot, which was an old name for the letter. I suspect the levelling went the other way, reshaping jot to match kay.
> Post-Etruscan Letters: >
G actually belongs here, it's a Roman invention.
> g > /dZi/
> v > /vi/ > z > /zi/ or /zEd/ < zeta
These were formed by analogy with the stops, I guess --- which is probably to the best, since using the Etruscan sonorant pattern could make the pairs f/v and s/z very hard to distinguish.
> w > /d@b@(l)ju/
I assume everybody knows the story here.
> y > /wai/
Now this is a mystery. I assume the Romans called it ypsilon; French uses i-grec. Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)