Re: Phonetics L's
From: Ivanovas/Milatos
Message: 820
Date: 2000-01-09
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<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Hello,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">there is an interesting shift of L/w/r
sounds in modern Cretan, but only from the central mountain region where people
are most conservative. (people make jokes about them, too, Andrew, but never in
front of them because they are supposed to be war-like and many families there
own kalashnikows ...). Although here the problem of the 'normal' Greek speaker
is that the mountain Cretans don't differentiate between L and R (their 'come',
GR 'ella' sounds like 'ewa', their Rs similar, although Greeks would say/hear
them saying 'era' - a bit like EN 'error').</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">But the most interesting thing here is the
time depth of the phenomenon:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">the first documented Greek speakers, the
Mycenaeans, had a lot of problems when they adapted the Minoan writing system to
their language, because it didn't have two phonemes L and R as Greek has (among
other problems as little differences between D/L sounds: da-pu-ri-to is said to
have meant 'labyrinthos'). </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">So I start now telling mountain Cretans
they might reply: may be we are with our language still nearest to the early
high civilization we had in ancient Crete, even before the Greeks knew how to
read and write! ;-))</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Best wishes from Crete</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Sabine</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>