At 6:25:58 PM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004, Stephen
Mulraney wrote:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>>>So the greek beta wasn't 'definitely v'. /B/ is a good
>>>enough approximation to /w/ for someone who wants to
>>>design an alfabet for a written language.
>> As I recall, beta had already ceased to be pronounced [b]
>> several centuries before the Cyrillic alphabet was devised.
>> Moreover, Ptolemy writes <Ouirokonion>, not <Birokonion>,
>> for Roman <Viroconium> (Wroxeter, Salop.).
> That's because he was transcribing the Roman
> pronunciation, which pronounced 'v' as 'w'.
That's the whole point! Torsten was suggesting that in the
9th century beta might still have been [B], so that the
Slavic sound that it was chosen to represent might have been
[w] rather than [v]. But Ptolemy wrote <oui->, not <bi->,
to represent /wi-/, so he apparently did not consider beta a
reasonable approximation to /w/ in his day.
However, Ptolemy is just a little too early to be as good an
example as I was thinking when I originally posted. Now
that I'm back with my books, I see that Geoffrey Horrocks,
citing Gignac 1976, says that the shift of /b, d, g/ to the
voiced fricatives /B, D, G/ was completed for the majority
of literate speakers by the 4th century CE, though he also
says that frication affected /b/ by the first century CE.
(Another source notes, for instance, first century
misspellings like <kateskébasan> for <kateskéuasan>
'installed' and <`raûdos> for <`rábdos> 'staff'.)
Fortunately, there's no shortage of later examples in the
form of Greek versions of Germanic names, e.g., <Ouísandos>
(Latin <Visandus>) in Procopius (6th c.).
(But it's not clear to me that Ptolemy was transcribing
Roman pronunciation. I believe that his main source for
this was the Greek of Marinos of Tyre, and I've no idea what
*his* sources were. Presumably the underlying name is
British in any case.)
> For that matter, the distinction between the letters "V"
> and "U" is a later innovation - so the Roman name was
> <VIROCONIVM> or (to better suggest the sounds to our eyes)
> <uiroconium>.
I assumed that that was common knowledge.
Brian