Re: Aspirate clusters (was: Hellenish oddities)

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