Re: [tied] Russian for Homerus

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Sergejus Tarasovas"
<S.Tarasovas@...> wrote:

> These are <Gom鲦gt; and <Gon⩪>. An initial <g-> is traditional (one
> would expect <x-> in a present-day borrowing): a bulk of foreign

names

> containing [h] were adopted in the 18th c., when Russian

intellectuals

> used to talk a local variant of Church Slavonic to each other

(except

> they were drunk, quarreling or discussing everyday life), and

Russian

> Church Slavonic orthoepy ascribes a phonetic value of [G]

([fricative

> g]) or even [h] to what is spelled <g>, so <Gom鲦gt; and <Gon⩪>

seemed

> to fit better than +<Xom鲦gt; and +<Xon⩪> (cf. also <G鮲ix G骮e> for=

> Heinrich Heine and even <Gí´¬er> for Hitler, the latter being merely
> traditional, as nobody spoke Church Slavonic in 1920). An older

Russian

> name for Homer was <Omí²¦gt; -- a direct borrowing from Middle Greek,

but

> it (and many others) was completely lost out to the more prestigious
> form adopted from the languages of Western Europe (German in this

case).

>
>
> Sergei

I was wondering if the Russian translitteration Western h- > Russian
g- had anything to do with the status of the Dutch language under
Peter the Great (and with that language's later replacement by German
under Catharina, which would mean a development in some loaned words
G- > g-)?

Torsten