Re: Y not? (was: Of Haa/hhet & other matters)

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> On Sunday, January 23, 2005, at 03:49 , Muke Tever wrote:
>>>
>> The *original* use of |V| was the vowel /u(:)/. Its use for [u]'s
>> semivowel [w] was based on that value,
>
> Do have actual evidence of this? All my information is that right from the
> start V in Roman spelling was used _both_ for the long and short vowels /u(
> :)/ _and_ for the semivowel /w/. The semivowel was not an allophone of /u/
>   as it is in the modern romance languages; it was a separate phoneme.
>
> On the other hand its use in Etruscan and western Greek was for the vowel
> only.
I suppose I may have spoken a bit audaciously.  What I meant was
that the Romans borrowed an |V| that they only[?] knew as a vowel,
and then invented its use for [w] -- admittedly I don't know whether
that was a feature there from the beginning, or whether it took any
time.

I do know that the emperor Claudius invented an inverted letter F to
represent [w]--as well as a couple other letters for [y] and [ps]--
though none of them caught on; the point fwiw being that he didn't think
[u] needed a new letter.  (But then, why a letter for [y] anyway?
Didn't they already have |Y| for [y] at the time?  What else was it
doing?  Had |Y| perhaps already gone to [i]?)

> On Monday, January 24, 2005, at 10:30 , Tristan McLeay wrote:
> [snip]
>> Using <h> to mark digraphs goes back that far?
>
> No, not really. This a one off. There is no such tradition during the
> subsequent centuries. I am darn sure that those who introduced the
> spellings CH, PH and TH for the Greek /k_h/, /p_h/ and /t_h/ in the 1st
> cent BCE had no idea that FH had been used some five centuries earlier!
That's assuming the Praeneste fibula is genuinely from that era
at all, which is disputed...



	*Muke!
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