zeta (was: écagne ,and ConLand names in translation(was: RE: RV: Old English))

At 4:29 pm -0500 3/4/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> In the Hellenistic period the pronunciation of zeta was clearly [zz] (as
>> word initial one assumes just [z]).  In the earlier period it appears to
>> have been varied between [zz] and [zd] according to dialect.
>
>That's something that's always struck me as counterintuitive:
Nothing to do with intuition.  But I should've said: "In the earlier period
it appears to have been varied between [zz], [dd] and [zd] according to
dialect."

>why would
>a protoform like *[dyeus] become [zdeus], rather than [dzeus]?  The latter
>is a straightforward example of palatalization (cf. Japanese t --> ts / _u),
(t + u --> tsu doesn't look like palatalization to me; however the Japanese
t + i --> tSi does  :)

The ProtoGreek form was undoubtably something like [dZews] with a palatal
affricate at the beginning.  It's pretty clear that ProtoGreek went through
a fairly "palatalized" period.  The sounds conventionally represented in
Linear B by zi, ze, za, zo, zu represented something like
[tSi]/[tS_hi]/[dZi], [tSe]/[tS_he]/[dZe] etc.  And there were other
palatalizations.

But as, e.g. in early French & in Welsh, this was followed by
depalatalization; e.g. [pçolis] --> [ptolis] or simply [polis] according to
dialect.

It's also clear that archaic & Classical Greek (unlike modern Greek) did
not tolerate affricates.  Non-Greek names with combinations like [ts]
simply get hellenized as [s] or [ss].

The ProtoGreek [tS] or [tç] became either [tt] or [ss] according to
dialect, e.g. Talassa, Talatta (sea).

Likewise [dZ] or [dj] would become - and almost certainly did become - [dd]
or [zz] in many dialects.  But the latter two sounds were anomalous in the
Greek system.  Voiced plosives were never otherwise geminated (hence {gg}
was able to be employed unambiguously to denote [Ng]) and [z] occurred
otherwise only as an allophone of /s/ before a voiced consonant, so.....

>while the former, unless you invoke haphazard metathesis from an originally
....[zd] did develope in many dialects, but *not* haphazardly - to produced
a sound that was in keeping with Greek phonology of the Classical period:
[zd] = /sd/.

Attic (Ionian) Greek had /tt/ from earlier [tS], while the Asiatic Ionians
generally preferred /ss/.  Instead of the anomalous [dd], they had [zd]
/sd/ as is shown in some of the spellings where zeta obviously represents
/sd/ derived from a different source, e.g. /aTe:nasde/ "to Athens".

The Asiastic Ionians seem quite happy just to have accomodated [zz] since
this became the normal Hellenistic pronunciation (just as Attic {tt} gave
way to {ss} in the Hellenistic Koine).  But the later spelling of Aeolic
Greek texts with sigma-delta where other dialects had zeta, shows that the
Classical [zd] was slow to give way to [zz] in some places.

Ray.

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