Greek hy & "movable-s" (was: Celtic languages?)

On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 02:54 , Muke Tever wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 03:11:52 -0700, Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>
> wrote:
[snip]
> Actually Greek |hyper| isn't necessarily from *super, given that all
> initial y- (save the name of the letter itself)
No - not even that. It's ancient name was [hy:] or [hu:] in the dialects
that retained [h], as is clearly shown by the adjective _hyoeide:s_ (-->
Eng. 'hyoid') "shaped like the letter Y". The name _y psilon_ is a later
Alexandrian invention, to distinguish Y from _y diphthongos_ OI, when both
|o| and |oi| were pronounced [y].

(Before some writes in that [y] is not a diphthong - I *know*. But in
ancient Greek _diphthongos_ meant a digraph of two vowels, not 'diphthong'
  as used in modern linguistics)

> comes out to hy- in any case, whether there was an *s or not.  Given that
> Italic is apparently the only one with an *s there (which it also has in
> |sub|, which again isn't attested in other families) the Italic s- is
> probably an innovation.
A very valid point - thanks for drawing our attention to it.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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