Yes, but also because the
place-of-articulation difference between theta and phi, which of course existed
in Greek, was not made in Church-Slavic-influenced Russian. It's a natural
type of confusion, like the Cockney pronunciation of "nothing" as "nuffink".
Neither consonant occurred in the Proto-Slavic system of phonemes, though in
several Slavic dialects historical *xw- came to be realised as [f]. In the
oldest layer of Latin borrowings into early Mediaeval Polish Latin [f] (spelt
"f" or "ph") is quite consistently replaced with [p], e.g. Szczepan <
Stephanus, Lucyper < Lucifer, Pabian < Fabianus. In Polish, [f] became an
independent phoneme about the 13th century.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2000 3:51 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: The Birds - etymology found
Russ. Fadiej : Pol. Tadeusz <
Thaddeus,
Russ. Fiodor : Polish Teodor <
Theodo:ros,
Russ. Fiby : Pol. Teby <
The:bai
Joao wrote:
This is because Polish (Catholic)
received its loans through Latin (Th pronnounced like T) and Russian
(Orthodox) received them from Greek (Th pronnounced
fricative)