On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 09:27:32 +0000, tgpedersen
<
tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>A long time ago I vented an idea here that perhaps the vowels of the
>Greek alphabet were not reinterpretations of the signs for Phoenician
>laryngeals, as usually assumed, but that Greek at the time still had
>the PIE laryngeals, and that the signs for laryngeals were only
>reinterpreted as vowels later, as Greek lost the laryngeals.
>
>Jens recently, and (I think) Miguel then, sensibly pointed out that
>the Greek letters for vowels were also used for the e/o reflexes of
>the ablaut vowel.
>
>But then I got to think of the fact that Greek has two vowels for
>each of /e/ and /o/. Yes, they are used to distinguish length, but
>were they always? The letters themselves (epsilon/eta, omikron/omega)
>don't seem to be related.
You're acting as if the origin of the Greek letters were
something ill-understood, when actually the facts are known
very precisely.
Greek alpha /a/ comes from Phoenician *?alf (*?alpH). Since
Greek did not have a glottal stop, the letter name (meaning
"ox") was taken as acrophonic for Greek /a/ (and /a:/).
Greek (at least most dialects) *did* have a phoneme /h/, and
to write it, the Greeks could choose between Phoenician *he:
(laryngeal /h/) and *h.E:t (pharyngeal /h./). They opted
for the latter, which left */he:/ "hey!" free to stand for
Greek /e/, /E:/ or /e:/.
For the vowels /i(:)/ and /u(:)/, Phoenician offered the
semivowel letters *yo:d "hand" /j/ and *waw "hook" /w/.
Since Greek had no phoneme /j/, the leter iO:ta was
naturally adapted as /i/. Greek (at the time) *did* have a
phoneme /w/, so the Phoenician letter *waw was split
graphically into two variants, Y /u/ and >|, |< /w/ (the
latter becoming F under the influence of preceding E). The
new letter /u/ was added at the end of the alphabet, after
T. Note that when the Greek alphabet was adopted by the
Phrygians (who *did* have a phoneme /j/), the Phrygians used
the same trick, adopting straight iO:ta I for /i/, while
using the other Greek variant ("crooked" iO:ta, S) for the
phoneme /j/.
That only left /o/ (/O:/, /o:/) unaccounted for, and the
Greeks rather arbitrarily adopted the remaining Phoenician
letter that to their ears started with a vowel (*¿E:n "eye")
to represent it (it may have helped that "eye" is Greek
ophthalmos). Note that Iberian (which didn't have /h/)
adopted Phoen. */h.E:t/ (H) for /o/.
One variety of Greek that did not have the phoneme /h/ was
Ionian. There, the Greek letter /hE:ta/ H was pronounced
/E:ta/, and, again by the acrophonic principle, this
resulted in H being used to write the long vowel /E:/ (which
in Ionian continues both pre-Greek */e:/ and */a:/). This
prompted the subsequent invention of a corresponding vowel
sign for /O:/, which is merely a graphical variation on O
(perhaps originally two circles on top of each other). The
letter /O:/ was added at the end of the alphabet (after the
other letters invented by the Greeks, those being (in Ionia)
u: phe: khe: pse:).
In the other (non-Ionian) epichoric alphabets, H remained in
use as /h/, and was so transmitted to the Etruscans (and
then the Romans), and the /O:/ sign was unknown, until the
official adoption of the Ionian alphabet by most Greek city
states in the 4th. century BC.
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...