Re: A new phonemic distinction in Gzarondan

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 12:06:30 -0400, J. 'Mach' Wust
<j_mach_wust@...> wrote:
> I remember a girl that
> told me that the Cyrillic alphabet had a letter for [h], and I assume she
> meant |x|.
Or possibly |g|, since /g/ is [h] in some areas (especially the
south-west, I believe, e.g. Rostov-na-Donu).


On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:25:23 +0200, Philippe Caquant
<herodote92@...> wrote:
> Ancient Greek had apparently an h, since it was
> written above the initial vowel (we call this an
> 'esprit rude' in French). Ex: the article 'ho' (the,
> masc.), written o with this sign on it.
*nods* I believe the English name is "rough breathing" (contrast
"smooth breathing"); sometimes, the Latin words "spiritus asper" and
"spiritus lenis" are used.

However, breathings were lost many hundreds of years ago and are not
even written any more in Modern Greek since the orthography reform of
1984.

For that matter, I believe that eta, the H-shaped glyph, represented
[h] in some dialects of Ancient Greek -- and I've read that the signs
for rough breathing (roughly, "(") and smooth breathing (roughly, ")")
occur from half of the H sign, i.e. something like |-- and --|.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!

Replies