Re: [tied] Re: Scythians, Zoroastrians, etc.

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 1:35 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Scythians, Zoroastrians, etc.

>> [PG:] The Greeks may have hesitated occasionally over the choice of zeta or sigma to represent foreign /z/, but there's no real evidence of s-voicing in Thracian.

> [TP:] Unreal, then?

>> [PG:] Sure cases of etymological *s and *k^ (e.g. hydronyms like Serme:/Sermius < *ser-mo- 'current, flow') contain <s> in Greek and Latin orthography.

> [TP:] In other words the Greeks reserved their hesitation between /s/
and /z/ to words of uncertain etymology?

 

No, they hesitated between the _letters_ zeta (which originally stood for [zd] rather than [z]) and sigma to represent the _sound_ of [z] (or a similar voiced coronal fricative) in some environments, also in Greek words (<pelasgikon ~ pelazgikon>, <smurna> ~ <zmurna>). It was only in late Byzantine Greek that the normal phonetic value of zeta became [z]. Hence the variation in words like <esb- ~ ezb->, perhaps also in other positions, e.g. in <semele:> for *zemela: and in <re:sos> for *re:z-, if their identification as 'Earth' (personified) and 'king' is correct. But this doesn't work the other way round. Thracian [s] was consistently rendered as sigma, not as zeta.

 

Piotr