Hi Karl, As promised, here's the second part of my response below.
On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 07:47:06 -0800, K Randolph <[email protected]> wrote: > Will: > > On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Will Parsons <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, 5 Dec 2012 16:15:15 -0800, K Randolph <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > >> > On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Will Parsons <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> (Incidentally, the creation of the Greek alphabet may not be entirely >> due to "the man on the street". It very well could be that some of >> the adaptions, such as the remarkable repurposing of consonantal >> letters as vowels, was the brain-child of an ancient equivelent of >> Cyril or Wulfila, one whose name has been lost to history.) > > Possibly, though the repurposing of some consonants as vowels appear > to have been the result of incomplete understanding of the > alphabet. My understanding is that in Biblical era Hebrew, the > alphabet was really a syllabary, but one that didn’t have a way to > represent its vowels. The Greek man on the street understood that > each letter stood for a phoneme, so his repurposing of softer > gutturals representing phones not found in Greek could just as well > been a result of misunderstanding as purposeful. I think it's possible that the adaptation of Phoenician gutterals as vowels could be the result of misunderstanding the nature of the script, but so likely as a conscious decision. After all, Semitic-type alphabets travelled East as well as West, usually resulting in a very imperfect representation of the borrowing languages. The Indians though, realized that regularly representing vowels was necessary to representing their language(s), and came up with a means that involved adding additional elements to the consonantal core of the syllable to do so - quite different from the Greek solution, and not involving the repurposing of consonantal letters. >> >> Apart from what I've written above, I see as a more fundamental >> >> problem with a consonant cluster like [ks] acting as a single phoneme >> >> (and hence being represented by a single letter) in Hebrew (or other >> >> Semitic languages). If samekh *did* represent a cluster, then I would >> >> expect to see at least some instances where samekh was used in words >> >> where /k/ and /s/ as separate sounds happened to fall together, i.e., >> >> a parallel to Greek νυξ/nyx vs νυκτες/nyktes. >> > >> > Why? I see no reason that would be the case. Just because it was found >> > in Greek doesn’t mean that it should be found in other languages. I >> > don't know where that is found in any language other than Greek. >> >> This doesn't really have anything to do with the Greek language, but >> with Greek spelling. There's nothing in Greek that requires xi (or >> psi) to exist, and the fact that they are used is a peculiarity of >> Greek orthography, without any deep significance. > > See above about phonemic spelling. That the ancient Greeks apparently wrote > phonemically, their inclusion of these “consonant clusters” as individual > letters shows that they considered them as phonemes, not as consonant > clusters. I don't think that follows. In English, the usual pronunciation of the "ch" combination is as an affricate, and I think the average speaker of English would consider it a single sound (i.e., a single phoneme) rather than a sequence of sounds. It's clear that the Greeks *did* consider xi a sequence of sounds /ks/, since there are explicit descriptions of it so (such as Dionysios Thrax, whom I cited in my previous response). > Incidentally, your example for the Greek Xi changing to a Kappa in certain > situations has its correspondence in other languages, for example in > English, the en- as in energize become em- before a labial as in embattle. > And we could probably find many similar examples. This is consonantal > substitution that sometimes happens where there are found consonantal > clusters. I think you misunderstand me. My example wasn't meant to illustrate xi changing to kappa, but rather that it was simple graphic convenience. A clearer example may be singular ελιξ/helix vs plural ελικες/helikes, "twisted". Viewed phonemically as /heliks/, /helikes/, these forms are completely regular, representing the addition of the regular 3rd decl. Nsg ending /s/ and the Npl ending /es/ to the stem /helik-/. The fact the /ks/ is represented by the single letter Ξ has no phonemic significance. >> For an example other than Greek, look at Coptic. Coptic uses the >> Greek alphabet supplemented with additional letters for sounds not >> found in Greek, but Coptic phonology is different from Greek in many >> particulars. The Greek letters Φ/phi, Θ/theta, Χ/khi were originally >> used in Greek for aspirated stop phonemes. > > Other than Coptic, what is your evidence for this? I’m not saying you’re > wrong, at least not directly, I’m just raising a question. But so far, the > only evidence I have seen for this assertion is very questionable. Hey, Karl, be fair! First you asked for an example other than Greek, and I got you one - Coptic. Now you want *more* examples? Incidentally, there's another way in which Coptic provides evidence that spelling may not be a reliable way of determining phonematicity (is that a word?). On of the letters that Coptic added to the basic Greek alphabet was a letter representing the combination [ti]. Why this particular combination was given a letter of its own is a mystery to me, but it's hard to believe that [ti] could be a single phoneme when [pi], [ta], &c. were not. >> Coptic apparently did not >> have aspirated stops, but it did have consonant clusters that could >> include an /h/ phoneme. Not surprisingly, phi, &c. were used in the >> numerous Greek loanwords in Coptic, but also, perhaps more >> surprisingly, in native Coptic words to represent a consonant >> cluster. For example: >> >> /p/ = masculine definite article >> /ho/ = face >> /pho/ = "the face", spelled ΦΟ, with a phi. > > That could also reflect that when this spelling was adopted, that there was > a real difference in pronunciation that was later changed, that this > represented a consonantal substitution that sometimes happens when > languages have consonantal clusters. >> >> This is parallel to the Greek use of xi and psi, but (and this is my >> point) we do not see anything similar in Phoenician or Hebrew for >> samekh. >> > You do find it in Masoretic and later Hebrew as indicated by their points, > but not Biblical era Hebrew. If Biblical era Hebrew was a syllabary, as I > think the majority of the evidence seems to indicate, then there were no > consonantal clusters, therefore no consonantal substitution in consonantal > clusters as in languages such as Greek and English. I suppose that would be true, but I (like most others) do not see Hebrew as not having consonantal clusters in the interior of words. -- Will Parsons μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι. _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
