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Re: Aspirate clusters (was: Hellenish oddities)

From:Eric Christopherson <raccoon@...>
Date:Monday, November 27, 2000, 3:23
On Sun, Nov 26, 2000 at 07:13:56PM +0100, BP Jonsson wrote:
> At 07:47 2000-11-26 +0000, Raymond Brown wrote: > >It seems more credible to me that the former with written with two > >aspirates because that's how they were pronounced (regressive > >assimilation); but the latter were written as pi-phi, tau-theta and > >kappa-khi because aspiration did not occur until the geminate plosive was > >released. That is, the spelling reflected the actual pronunciation and the > >ancient greeks were not guilty of a bizarre & illogical spelling convention. > > OK, I'll grant that, per Marcus' proviso that an ephenthesis might actually > have been present. It occurs to me that Sanskrit had phonemic schwa while > greek hadn't, which might be of some relevance here. It also occurs to me > that the first of the two aspirations may actually have been > pre-aspiration, tho that does not help much when the cluster is word initial...
I'm not sure what you mean by phonemic shwa -- do you mean the short <a>? -- Eric Christopherson / *Aiworegs Ghristobhorosyo