Greek vowels; was Re: an announcement...

Ed Heil writes:

>Fun Trivia about Greek You Probably Already Know:
Cool, I'm a master at useless trivia.

>Very strangely from a typological perspective, ancient Greek seems to
>have *reversed* the quality/quantity values for its E's and O's.  That
>is, eta (long e) had the quality in English "Ed" (E:) whereas epsilon
>(short e) had the quality of "a" in "rake." (e)  Similarly, long Omega
>had the value of English "saw" (O:) while short omicron had the value
>of English "hope" (o).
>
>[O:] [o] [E:] [e] is very very weird.  [O] [o:] [E] [e:] is much more
>common.
Correct.  But E ~ E: and O ~ O: occurs in many languages.  And as a matte=
r=20
of fact, modern Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi-Urdu, have e ~ E: (=
<=20
Sanskrit ai) and o ~ O: (< Skt au).

But I wonder if epsilon and eta had the same vocal quality except length,=
=20
omicron and omega likewise.  It does seem more 'natural'.  Especially in=20
light of the existence of the 'spurious diphthongs' you mention:

>Occasionally, there *would* be a need to represent [o:] or [e:]
>(these sounds were uncommon but existed, mostly as a result of
>contraction), and these were written with the so-called "spurious
>diphthongs" (digraphs), "ou" and "ei" (omicron-upsilon and
>epsilon-iota).  This is problematic for those of us who would like to
>pronounce ancient Greek correctly, because there also existed genuine
>"ou" and "ei" diphthongs, which were written the same way.
Confusing.  I actually have a couple Greek fonts that use the characters=20
epsilon-circumflex and omicron-circumflex (circumflex normally is only be=
=20
used on long vowels); I wonder if that what they're for...

>Oh, to top it all off, eta represented two different values too.  In
>addition to [E:] it represented a long version of the "a" sound in
>English "hat" [&:] -- this sound arose from a lowering of [a:] in
>certain positions, most famously at the ends of words such as in the
>first declension ending.
That makes sense; since the feminine ending -e is obviously a shift of PI=
E=20
-a: (< -ah, possibly Nostratic link with Semitic -at > -ah?).  Umlaut?

By the way, German converts Greek ai/Latin ae to a-umlaut, and oi/Latin o=
e=20
to o-umlaut.  Examples: Ge <=C4gypt> 'Egypt' from Gk <Aigyptos>, and=20
<=F6kumenisch> 'ecumenical' from <oikumene:> 'household'.  How did these=20
fronted vowels (especially the latter, the front mid round) come about?

(From what I understand, the Western school of Greek and Latin pronunciat=
ion=20
came a lot from Erasmus and maybe Luther.

Danny

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