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

On Tuesday, January 25, 2005, at 04:59 , Muke Tever wrote:

> 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/. T
[snip]

> 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] -
Yes - they took it from Etruscan where indeed it was only a vowel.

> - admittedly I don't know whether that was a feature there from the
> beginning, or whether it took any
> time.
We simply do not know.

> I do know that the emperor Claudius invented an inverted letter F to
> represent [w]--
He certainly did - it would have made Latin spelling more phonemic.

> as well as a couple other letters for [y]
.... like the left half of uppercase H.

> and [ps]--
reversed C

> though none of them caught on;
They were actually used during his reign; the inverted F is found at
Pompeii - but, you are right, they didn't survive it.

> the point fwiw being that he didn't think [u] needed a new letter.
That is simply because |V| denoted the vowel sounds far more often than
the semivowel.

> (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]?)
No. |Y| was still pronounced [y] in Greek in Claudius' time and presumably
was pronounced that way by educated Romans. Claudius' new letter was the
for the unstressed sound spelled |u| by some writers and |i| by others in
words like;
lacruma ~ lacrima
maxumus ~ maximus
lubet ~ libet
(the spellings with |i| eventually won out by the 2nd cent CE and are the
forms given in text books).
It's assumed by some that the sound was [y], but this is not certain.

>
>> 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...
Not really - as I doubt whether any of the Romans of the 1st cent BCE were
aware of the fibula, whether it came from Praeneste or not. I also doubt
that they would even have recognized MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI as
Latin.

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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