On 1/3/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> The earlier systems appear to have used an 8 year cycle of 99 lunations,
> i.e. three years in the cycle had an extra intercalated month.
... hence the alternating 49- and 50-month intervals between
Olympiads. No matter how your particular city state arranged the
months into years, everyone could see and count the moon phases, so
they neatly sidestepped the calendrical differences that way. But if
you happen to have a system that makes each of those intervals exactly
four years, so much the better...
> But while the Metonic cycle caught on (it is still used for the modern
> Hebrew calendar and for determining Easter in both the Old and the New
> style calendars), the Callipic cycle did not catch on. I guess a 76 year
> cycle was felt just too long for practical use.
Perhaps, but the new-style calendar has a 400-year cycle, so I'd
expect 76 to be manageable.
>It seems that in the classical pronunciations, the mid vowels /e/ and
/o/ had,as
> in Middle English, _two_ long pronunciations, one high & the other low.
And they were phonemically distinct? I didn't know that - about Mid.
English either.
> For a reasonable description of ancient Greek pronunciation, I suggest
> Sidney Allen's "Vox Graeca"
That sounds like a winner; I own his _Vox_Latina_. But shouldn't the
title of the Greek one be in Greek instead of Latin? :)
> But better still IMO, if you read French...
Not well enough for a technical nonfiction book to be anything but a
long laborious exercise in avoiding RSI from frequent
dictionary-flipping. :)
> >>In modern Greek such nouns become masculines ending -ώνας
> > And how is Zeta pronounced in modern Greek?
>
> [z]
>
> But the final letter of -ώνας is sigma [s].
Oh. <squints> So it is. These are new eyeglasses, too. The only
difference in this font is the little serif at the top of the zeta,
but even so.
--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>