thanks, peter, for the correction and supplementation. cheers; bill

>william bright wrote:
>>
>> michael everson said:
>>
>> >No, of course not. PBF is accidental. If it were systematic, then
>> >Latin would be featural.
>>
>> very true, but i can't resist pointing out that the tick which
>> distinguishes G from C is in fact "featural" in origin, tho this doesn't
>> mean that the roman alphabet should be considered featural.
>>
>> the point is, roughly, that the romans borrowed the alphabet from the
>> etruscans, who had only voiceless stops P T C (C = [k]). but latin also had
>> voiced stops [b d g], so they had to borrow letters from elsewhere. they
>> got B D from greek, with a little modification of the latter; but for some
>
>Every Etruscan abecedary includes the voiced consonants, even though
>they weren't used in writing Etruscan.
>
>> reason they didn't borrow greek gamma for [g]. Until around 230 BCE, the
>
>Gamma was already busy being <C>.
>
>> romans kept on writing [k] and [g] both as C. then a man named spurius
>> carvilius ruga invented the letter G by adding a graphic "feature".
>> nevertheless, as a deliberate archaism, the romans continued to abbreviate
>> the personal names "gaius" and "gnaeus" as "C." and "CN." respectively.
>> hence "gaius julius caesar" was written C. IVLIVS CAESAR.
>>
>> i've always thought that we should celebrate the birthday of spurius
>> carvilius ruga, or put his picture on a postage stamp, or something - the
>> man who invented "G"! i'm mortified to admit that his name was misprinted
>> in WWS as "rufa". cheers; bill
>
>Presumably it wasn't in May.
>
>OCD2 doesn't include his third name; the source is Plutarch, Quaest.
>Rom. 59. Does anyone have it handy? 11th Britannica says "he was
>probably the first to spell his name RUGA rather than RUCA."
>--
>Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
>
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--
William Bright
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics & Anthropology, UCLA
Professor Adjoint of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder
Editor, Written Language and Literacy
Editor, Native American Placenames of the United States
1625 Mariposa Avenue, Boulder, CO 80302
Tel. 303-444-4274
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William Bright's website: http://www.ncidc.org/bright