Re: OT: Lord's Prayer [Re: Opinions wanted: person of vocatives]

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 01:13:42AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> THe Greek alphabet as we know it is essentially Ionic/Attic.  Other
> dialects used other versions.  Specifically, in the West "eta" represented
> the rough breathing, and "pi" mutated to a form closely resembling "rho",
> so that a distinguishing stroke was added to "rho".  (The Attic breathing
> marks represent the left and right halves of capital "eta", reduced to
> apostrophe-like marks).
Ah!  So the Greek alphabet borrowed by the Romans was itself
different from the Greek alphabet we know; it wasn't the Romans who changed
things around, it was that the alphabet itself had changed en route.
That makes sense, as it means the change was more incremental.

Thanks for the explanation.

-Mark