Re: GSF revisited

R A Brown skrev:


 > I want to keep "Flexionless Greek" (FG) free from any
 > Byzantine and/or modern influence. I have in mind a
 > conhistory in which survivors of the Graeco-Bactrian
 > kingdom move eastwards towards China and that a Greek-
 > based pidgin is formed and comes to be used in a mixed-
 > race community; because of the perceived prestige status
 > of Greek, the vocabulary is almost entirely Greek, but the
 > language becomes flexionless à la chinoise. The pidgin
 > then becomes the L1 of the children of this mixed
 > community and thus becomes a creole. These "flexionless
 > Greeks'" have adopted Buddhism - maybe Benct Philip might
 > fill out the conhistory for me :)

If I had time! :-) My own Neo-Tocharian lies in abeyance for
lack of time, both the language, the culture and the
religion. For a quick orientation have a look at <http://en-
.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism#Central_Asia> (or
<http://tinyurl.com/3bpjek> for short), and the links
therein. Sarvastivadins and Dharmaguptakas were dominant in
Central Asia before the rise of the Mahayana (e.g. the
Tocharian kings patronizing the Sarvastivada). Sarvastivada
may be your best choice, since Sarvastivadin texts and
teachings are amply preserved, having merged into the
Mahayana rather than been replaced by it. Also the
Sarvastivada has some points of convergence (or influence?)
with some major trends in Greek philosophy (see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarvastivada>).

(Un Sarvastivadine? Moi? Mais non! ;-)

BTW have a look at

- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians>
- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria>
- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdiana>
- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Khotan>

for some suggestions of the milieux and languages FG may
have encountered en route to China.

 > As for the language:
 >
 > 1. ORTHOGRAPHY & PHONOLOGY The language uses the Greek
 >    alphabet. They are too far removed from the Roman world
 >    to have ever known the Roman alphabet. Although their
 >    uppercase letters are the familiar Greek ones, they
 >    will have developed a different cursive script from the
 >    Greeks of the west. However, we will for convenience
 >    write with the familiar upper and lower-case Greek
 >    letters.


Have a look at the Central Asian varieties of Indic writing
to get an idea what it may look like. Siddham
<http://www.omniglot.com/writing/siddham.htm> should be very
inspiring, given your concultural setting!

  - diphthongs: AI, OI, AY and EY remain as true diphthongs,
 >   namely [aj], [Oj], [aw] and [Ew] respectively. (The
 >   shift of AI and OI to single vowels does not seem to
 >   happened till about 100 CE;

It seems to have been rather much earlier in some dialects,
notably Boeotian.


 >   Summary: there are eight simple vowels:
 >:  /i/ written I, EI    /y/ written Y        /u/ written OY
 >:  /e/ written H                             /o/  written Ω
 >:  /E/ written E        /a/ written A        /O/ written O
 >
 > there are four diphthongs: /aj/ written AI; /Oj/ written
 > as OI; /aw/ written as AY and /Ew/ written as EY.

What about /yi/? I know it was rather marginal. Probably it
merged with /y/ early on. If so YI may be around as an
(alternative) spelling of /y/. Maybe Y was used only in
digraphs! :-)

 > CONSONANTS: Λ M N P shall be as, for example, in Italian
 > /l m n r/ (i.e. Λ is a dental approximant, N is a dental
 > nasal and P is an apical trill). Γ (agma) was (and still
 > is) /N/ before a velar; in ancient Greek it was also
 >     clearly /N/ before M (as, indeed, the name _agma_
 >     /aNma/ implies); but there is no clear evidence how Γ
 >     before N was pronounced. However, in FG, F shall be

Methinks F is a typo for Γ there? Surely no digamma?

 >     /N/ before the velars K, Γ (gamma), X and Ξ, and
 >     before the nasals M and N. (For Γ = gamma, see below)
 >     Σ shall be [s], except before voiced consonants where
 >     it is assimilated to [z]. Ξ and Ψ are /ks/ and /ps/
 >     respectively, and Z is always /z/.

Will, conversely /z/ always be Z?

 >
 > Π, T , K are as /p t k/ in French and the Romance
 > languages, i.e. the are _unaspirated_ and the T is dental
 > rather than alveolar. B, Δ, Γ were certainly /b d g/ in
 > the ancient language, but are /v D G/ in modern Greek. We
 > do not know when the shift took place, but it seems to
 > have been completed by the Byzantine period. It had
 > certainly not occurred by the period we are considering,
 > but the are some indications that the process had begun in
 > some areas. I therefore propose to give these the values
 > of standard Spanish /b d g/, i.e. voiced plosives when
 > initial or following a nasal, voiced fricative elsewhere.
 > Φ, Θ, X -these were certainly aspirated, voiceless
 > plosives in the ancient language /p_h, t_h, k_h/ - but a
 > voiceless fricatives in the modern, namely /f T x/.
 > Evidence from graffiti at Pompeii (which a Greek, Oscan &
 > Latin speaking inhabitants at the time of its destruction)
 > shows this shift to have taken place in popular Greek
 > before the end of the 1st cent CE. So at present I am
 > undecided between:
 > (a) retaining the ancient pronunciation.
 > (b) treating rather like B, Δ, Γ, that is the are
 >     aspirated voiceless plosives when initial or after
 >     nasals, but voiceless fricatives elsewhere (Φ of
 >     course being a _bilabial_ fricative).
 > (c) a modification of (b) in which the aspirate has given
 >     way to a fricative, thus giving rise an affricate
 >     sound /pf tT kX/ when initial or after a nasal, and a
 >     simple voiceless fricative elsewhere - in (c) the
 >     fricative pronunciation of Φ will be [f].
 > (d) using the Byzantine & modern pronunciation.

One thing that should probably weigh in is the fact that
Central Asia, notably including Bactria and the lands west
north and east of it, at this time was dominated by Iranian
languages, which had rather full sets of fricative sounds.
Moreover these fricatives could apparently be written with
the Indic letters for aspirated stops. Earlier it was
thought that these letters stood for aspirates in languages
like Khotanese, but the way they transcribed Middle Chinese
into their Indic script has called this into question:

Title : A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script : new
evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and
Khotanese / Ronald E. Emmerick and Edwin G. Pulleyblank.
Publication : Roma : Istituto italiano per il Medio ed
Estremo Oriente, 1993. . Series : Serie orientale Roma, 69.

It is on the whole interesting as a document on how speakers
of IndoAryan, Iranian and SinoTinetan languages interpreted
each other's phonologies. Also have a look at the
Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology by Guillaume
Jacques <http://xiang.free.fr/leiden- en.pdf> for an idea
how Chinese Phonology may have influenced FG.

 > PROSODIES 1. Aspiration or non-aspiration of initial vowel
 > (or diphthong) was shown in the Alexandrian spelling by
 > the use of the "rough breathing" (dasia) and "soft
 > breathing" (psili) diacritics. But even in the ancient
 > Greek of the 5th century BCE many dialects (e.g. all
 > Ionian dialects, except that Athens) were psilotic, i.e.
 > they 'dropped their aitches'. This process gradually
 > extended to all Greek speakers and was probably the norm,
 > except among the 'learned', by the time of the period we
 > are considering. As the ancients themselves never actually
 > wrote these signs, they shall not exist in FG, which will
 > be psilotic.

NB that most Iranian languages had /h/, developed out of
    IndoEuropean *s much the same as in Greek -- except that
    Iranian languages did *not* lose intervocalic /h/! Also
    it is notable that the Greek alphabet developed in
    Bactria for the Iranian Kushan language includes a letter
    for /S/ which looks exactly like Þ (Thorn) and probably
    is derived from Greek aspirated Rho -- whether from the
    actual 'P graphy, or as a modification of P. This
    suggests that Greek as spoken in Bactria had a voiceless
    rhotic which could be identified with Kushan /S/, and as
    we know Greek P was written with a rough breathing in
    some positions (though not according to where it derived
    from PIE sr or rs, curiously!), which in turn suggests to
    me that Bactrian Greek was *not* psilotic.


Which brings up the question if there were any shibilants --
palatal(ized) and/or retroflex fricatives and affricates. in
your FG? To be sure Chinese and the Central Asian languages
of the time had plenty of such sounds. Greek ῤῥ (rrh) is
one possible source of such sounds, but so is palatalization
of velars and/or dentals, which occurs also in later Greek
varieties. At the very least there may have been loan words
from Iranian, Tocharian and Chinese languages which had
them. Some suggestions related to this:

  - I may be used as a palatalization diacritic, and then EI
    may be used to mark that palatalization does *not* take
    place -- e.g. ΣI or XI for /Si/ against ΣEI for /si/
    and XEI for /xi/. This would of course primarily apply to
    loan words, but may then influence how I and EI are used
    in Greek words.

  - Iranian and Chinese retroflex and palatoalveolar sounds
    may be identified with Greek dental + /r/ combinations,
    notably ΘP for /S/-like sounds.  This of course should go
    both ways, so that an Iranian /Sa:hj@/ would come out as
    ΘΡΑΙΟ. (NB /@/ is written O in Kushan, also e.g. Prakrit
    Candragutta > ΣΑΝΔΡΟΚΟΤΤΟΣ!)


 > At present I am considering using the accusative singular,
 > dropping a final -N if there is one, for all nouns,
 > whether 1st, 2nd or 3rd declension and whatever their
 > grammatical gender (FG shall, of course, have no
 > grammatical gender.

Seems reasonable. What happens to verbs? Will they be all
infinitive like in Lingua Franca, or derived from the 3.
person singular?

Too bad we don't know anything of the Greek pidgins that
must have existed in ancient times!
--

/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson
mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"If a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,
of what language, pray, is Basque a dialect?" (R.A.B.)

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