Re: [tied] classical Greek (and Latin) vowels

On Fri, 08 Nov 2002 20:33:37 -0000, "Lisa" <eris@...> wrote:

>Thanks very much, Miguel! That's very helpful to me.
>
>Just to clarify a couple things...
>
>- By "Pre-Greek" do you mean "Proto-Greek"? (The latter is the only
>term I am familiar with is why I ask.)

The convention (not always adhered to) is that Pre-X is the ancestor
of a single language X, while Proto-X is the ancestor of a set of
related languages (language family) X. Greek is generally considered
to be a single language, so Pre-Greek, but Proto-Germanic.

>- Was the "ae" diphthong in Latin pronounced as the "ai" diphthong,
>i.e. [ai]? Like "oi" and "oe" [oi](?), I had assumed the first for
>each simply came to be written as the second by convention. If this
>was not the case, and "ae" was qualitatively different from "ai", was
>the former [ae] and the latter [ai]? Also, did this differ from Pre-
>L to Classical-L?

The spelling <ae>, <oe> indicates that the second element was more
open than /i/ and closer to /e/. Most likely it was /I/, and Latin
<ae> sounded exactly like English <eye> or <I> = [aI] (and not like
Spanish <hay> or <¡ay!> = [ai]).


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...