Re: CHAT: Names of Latin alphabet letters

At 10:00 pm -0600 23/1/01, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>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.
Absolutely correct.  The sound change was dialectal even in England (I
don't think it occurred in Wales or Scotland), and when I was East Anglia
many, many moons ago it was still common enough in ordinary speech where,
e.g. _fertilizer_ became _fartilizer_!

Although standard English is derived from the early modern English of
London, many dialect forms got a foothold and those mentioned by Eric are
among them - but, except for name of the letter R - they never made it over
the Atlantic  :)

>
>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>,
You do remember correctly   :)

>and the digraph <QU> continues even to this day.
Yep - the Romans hit upon the idea that you could tell if V was /u/ or /w/
after /k/ by writing the /k/ differently!  So CV = /ku/ and QV = /kw/, e.g.
QVI /kwi:/ = who [relative]; CVI /kuj/ = to whom.

>
>[...]
>>> h
>>> /ejtS/
[snip]
>
>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>,
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.

The Old French /atS@/ is a regular development from this; and the modern
French /aS/ and the English /eitS/ are regular developments from the Old
French.  The Italian _acca_ still preserves the Vulgar Latin namw.

[....]
>Spanish cognate /atSe/ of the same spelling)
The Spanish is not a regular derivation from this; it would be *aca (or
*aga, see below).  The modern Spanish name looks like a borrowing from
older French.  The Portuguese _aga_, however, is from an earlier *aca and
is derived from the Vulgar Latin Form.

>came from this <ach>, and let
>to <eitS> by regular sound changes.
Exactly - and in several modern English dialects it has become /heitS/, for
fairly obvious reasons.

>Lars Henrik Mathiesen also wrote:
[....]
>
>According to the aforementioned AHD, one name for it in Latin was in fact <y
>graeca>,
It could well be, since in Late Latin the classical /hy/ would have become
/i/, making it synonymous with the name for I.

>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...
So would I - "sygnifying the union of the shapes of the letters <I> and
<V>" looks like an early urban myth to me.  But I can well believe that the
alternative name /wi/ goes back, not as I said to Middle English way of
rendering [y], but to a late Latin attempt to retain something of the sound
[y] in  order to distinguish the name from /i/.  Now modern anglophones
tend to substitute /ju/ for [y] in foreign borrowings, but there is no
reason why other speakers might not render it as /wi/.  And as all the
other letter names were bequeathed to us by the Normans, it is more likely,
now I think about it, that they also bequeathed /wi/ to us, and that must
come from Vulgar Latin.

But I'm sure it's a Vulgar Latin reflex for [y], not sygnifying the union
of the shapes of the letters <I> and <V>".

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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