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

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. But I though this thread was discussing the original used in Roman
orthography. If we are going further back for the _original_ then we have
to remember that the Greek alphabets were derived from Phoenician, where
all letters were _consonants_. V was derived from Phoenician _wau_ /w/.
======================================================

On Sunday, January 23, 2005, at 05:28 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 04:22:28PM -0000, Michael Poxon wrote:
>> I think you'll find North Walian has three y's - /@/ ,  /i/ and the
>> distictive Northern Welsh sound (represented in IPA by a barred
>> lower-case
>> i)
>
> and in CXS by [1], which is what Ray said.  (At least I think it was Ray;
> you didn't indicate whom you were quoting.)
Yep, 'twas I.

>  So you two would seem to be
> almost in agreement, except that he said that [i] and [1] were the same
> vowel as spoken in different parts of the country (hence perhaps
> realizations of a single underlying phoneme /1/),
That is precisely what I have always understood.

> while you seem to be claiming that they can coexist within a single 'lect.
My information is that 'clear y' is always [1] in north Wales; I do not
know under what conditions 'clear' y' is sometimes [1] and sometimes [i]
in any dialect.

[snip]
> I find it pretty but counterintuitive.
Since when has the spelling of a natural language had to "intuitive". And
intuitive to whom? I guess a Turk might find Volapük's use of |c| = /dZ/
perfectly intuitive, but I guess neither an anglophone nor a francophone
would agree.

>  Things like |u| for /i/
|u| for /1/ rather. Is it less 'intuitive' than |u| for /y/? Nothing like
as weird as Greek Y, which was originally /u/ and is now either /i/,  or
/f/ or /v/ depending upon context, except in the OY combo which is /u/.

> and vocalic |w| are just freakin' weird. :)
Why? the letter was originally VV when V was used as a vowel as well as a
consonant - and we still call it "double _u_". Really VV should be [u:]  :
)
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On Monday, January 24, 2005, at 08:34 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
> [snip]
>> If one is to be serious, then I think the "first use of the letter as a
>> letter of the Latin alphabet" argument slightly irrelevant.
>
> I don't believe I've indicated a wish to be "serious" wrt to designing new
> orthographies. :)
No, I do not believe you have - just a bit of light banter. So was my
original reply to you :)

But it does seem that a more serious tone has been taken by some.
======================================================

On Monday, January 24, 2005, at 10:07 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:
[snip]
>> But |v|, with value [w], was the original letter of the Latin alphabet.
>> The letter |U| was was the later variant.
>
>  Unless I'm misinformed, it was |u| that kept the name of the original
> letter,
>  suggesting that |v| was felt to be the new one.
This is quite correct. In Latin texts in the past half century in Britain
it has become more and more the practice to print the Roman V as |V| when
capital and |u| as lower case.

>  (Incidentally, the Germans refer to |v| as /fau/. Does this have
> anything to do
>  with Semitic waw?)
It most certainly does. the name is spelled _Vau_ /faw/ in German. When
the new consonants |j| and |v| were created, there was no Latin name, so
various solutions were sought:
- use the old Greek names which were derived from Semitic. This is what
German did: Jot, Vau from Greek: io:ta, wau (Semitic: jo:d, wau); and
Spanish: _jota_.
- prefix the consonant sound to the previous vowel sound: ji, vu. The
Italians call |v| _vu_; they no longer use |j| in native Italian words
(except proper names) and now call it _i lungo_ "long i", referring to its
shape. French call |j| _ji_ and that was also its original name in English
where it was pronounced /dZaj/; but the English name got remodelled on the
analogy of |k| /kej/, so we now call it /dzej/.
- just call 'em _je_ and _ve_ on the analogy of most other consonants.
AFAIK _je_ is not popular (especially as in some languages _je_ & _ge_ wod
sound the same), but _ve_ is used in French & portugues and, pronounced
/vi/, in English. In Spain where [ve] would tend to be pronounced the same
as the name of the letter |b|, it is expanded to _uve_.

>  Incidentally, I seem to recall that the oldest Latin used |FH| or /f/.
> Did they
>  use F/digamma on it's own for anything? Using it for /w/ would have
> seemed the
>  obvious solution, but if that were done there would have been no reason
> to have
>  |V| do double duty for /u/ (and /u:/) and /w/.
Absolutely - but I know of no evidence that F was ever used for /w/ in
Latin. The inscription with FH is very archaic (early 6th cent BCE) and
comes from Praeneste - so it ain't Roman (Rome was originally just one of
several Latin towns). The text reads:
MANIOS MED FHE FHAKED NVMASIOI
(The word dividers are actually : and not 'white spaces', and it is
written from right to left. The perfect is formed by reduplication in the
Greek manner, fefaced = (has) made, but oddly the prefix is written as a
separate word!)

In the later Roman Latin in would be: Manius me: fe:cit Numerio: = Manius
made me for Numerius.

AFAIK this is the only inscription where /f/ is written FH; in other
Faliscan and early Latin inscriptions it is just plain F.
=====================================================
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!

> I thought it was just a
> generalisation of <ch> and <th> and <ph> to represent what to the
> Latins was I think /kh/, /th/ and /ph/ (though to the Ancient Greeks
> /k_h/ etc.).
...to which you should also add RH for Greek [r_h] (an allophone of /r/ in
Greek).

You are correct - this was 'spring-board' for the use of |h| as a "digraph
modifier", which was made easier in the Romance languages since |h| had no
proper sound of its own.

Ray
=======================================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"

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