Re: Greek flavoring (was: My Apologies about Mysterious sounds)

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 06:46:52 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> ancient Greek
> allowed only the consonants /n/, /r/ and /s/ (including /ps/ and /ks/) in
> word final position (apparent exceptions like _ek_ and _ouk_ occur only on
> proclitics). Modern Greek is even more restrictive in that final -n has
> been much reduced
And final -r has all but disappeared since many third-declension nouns
got turned into first-declension nouns (e.g. rêtôr -> ritoras); this
also did away with a number of final -n's (e.g. Poseidôn ->
Posidonas).

Off the top of my head, the only words with final -n in Demotic are
accusative articles to(n) and ti(n), and even there, the -n can be
dropped depending on the following word. Oh, and genitive plurals in
-on. But e.g. accusatives of first declension nouns are simply -a/-i
and those of second declension nouns and adjectives are simply -o
(this includes neuter nominative). And a couple of third declension
nouns such as "to on, to symban, to paron, to parelthon".

> (tho I have no doubt some modern borrowings from other
> languages retain final consonants).
No doubt -- see, for example, "to Internet". (I wonder whether |nt|
represents [nd], [d], or [nt] here? Possibly depends on the speaker
and/or how much English they know.)

The preferred strategy a couple of hundred years ago was to
Græcicise(?) consonant-final borrowings by adding -i; compare e.g.
tsepi "pocket" with Turkish cep. (The -i ending being a derivation, I
believe, from Ancient Greek diminutives in -ion but now being a
full-fledged ending of its own.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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