Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

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> 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)