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

On Sunday, January 23, 2005, at 12:34 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:
>
>> From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
>>> Needless to say, I, as a Swede, disagree; |y| is, as even the
>>> IPA accepts, to be used for /y/! This moreover is the original
>>> use of the letter.
>>
>> Well, that depends on what you mean by "letter", right? I mean,
>> the very same form was used originally with the value /u(:)/
>> in Greek.
Good point - and it was still pronounced that way in the Dorian Greek
speaking cities of southern Italy in the Roman period.

> I meant the first use of the letter as a letter of the Latin alphabet. To
> which
> an extent a letter of the Latin script can be considered "the same" as
> one of
> the Greek is, I suppose, a rather philosophical question.
Not in the case of Y and Z, I think. It is true that all the 21 Roman
letters from A to X (excluding the later inventions of |j|, |v| and |w|)
are ultimately derived from the western Greek set of alphabets. But the
letters Y and Z were deliberately borrowed from the (eastern) Ionian Geek
alphabet in the late 1st cen BCE and were used only in the spelling of
Greek words (|z| occurred in one or two other foreign borrowing also).

So it seems to me that in the case of Y it was still the Greek letter; and
although educated Romans pronounced it [y(:)] as in 'standard' Koine Greek,
  the less educated do seem to have said [u(:)] in the Dorian manner.
================================================================

On Sunday, January 23, 2005, at 02:21 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 01:42:59PM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
> [snip]
> AJ> Needless to say, I, as a Swede, disagree; |y| is, as even the IPA
> accepts,
> AJ>  to be used for /y/! This moreover is the original use of the letter.
>
> RB> Yes it was, but I assume you would not use the same argument for
> |c| = /k/
> RB>   and |v| = /w/   ;)
>
> AJ> You assume to much. I'm quite inclined to think of /k/ as the
> AJ> default reading of |c|, and as for |v|, if I'm not mistaken, by the
> AJ> time it was accepted as a letter separate from |u|, the Latin
> AJ> consonant was generally pronounced as [v].
>
> Yes, it certainly was, since the separation of I/J and U/V was a very
> late development.  Medieval IIRC.
No - only positional variants in the middle ages. It was the humanists of
the Italian Renaissance that stabilized their use and formalized |Ii| and
|Uu| as vowels, and |Jj| and |Vv| as consonants.

> Whereas the |v| = [v] change had
> happened earlier, triggering the adoption of the digraph |vv|,
> which eventually became |w|, for [w] in new borrowings.
True - I should have said, since Andreas was banging on about 'original
use': "But I assume you would not use the same argument for |C| = /k/ or
/g/ and |V| = /u/ or /w/"

[snip]
> ................  If you're going to base things on
> "original use", you have to be consistent about what you consider
> "original".
Oh dear - I did put a smiley after my original remark. But an element of
pedantry seems to have come into this thread.
Well, Andreas said above: "I meant the first use of the letter as a letter
of the Latin alphabet."

OK - let us be consistent then.
Y - was adopted from the Ionian Greek alphabet in the late 1st cent BCE &
pronounced, by the educated as [y(:)];
C - was originally pronounced as both /k/ and /g/ in the Roman alphabet;
V - was pronounce as both /u(:)/ and /w/, which were different phonemes.

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. Two millennia
have passed since Y was added, and almost three millennia since the Romans
began using their alphabet!

Nor do I put any store in the argument that 'because I am not used to the
letter being used in such a way, it is 'unnatural' or 'inelegant'. Good
grief!

The Romans themselves augmented their original 20 letters by first adding
G, being a modification of C, to denote /g/, leaving C just to denote /k/,
bringing the number to 21 letters; then later they added the two Greek
letters Y and Z bringing it to 23 letters.

Since then W, J and U have been invented an added; in some places Ð ð (eth)
  and Þ þ (thorn) were added and are still used by the Icelanders. So
personally I find objections to adding letters such as ŋ (eng) and ə (shwa)
  rather pathetic.

But, of course, one can always devise one's own script and leave it others
to Romanize (or Cyrillicize) in whatever way they want to  :)

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

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