Re: re aleph beit

suzmccarth wrote:

>Peter Kirk just emailed me that verse 41 in Psalm 118 has a digamma
>at the beginning to indicate that it is the 6th section in the
>psalm, the section beginning with the Hebrew letter 'vav',
>transliterated into Greek as 'ouau'.
>
>However, online editions of the Septuagint variously display either
>a variant of omega or the letter v for the digamma. So the
>equivalence should be between the Greek digamma and Hebrew vav, not
>the omega and vav.
>
>Suzanne McCarthy
>

Etymologically, the Hebrew "vav" (originally "waw," like it is in
Arabic) is indeed cognate to digamma. However, since digamma dropped
out of Greek, the sound it represents, /w/, is now written as "ou", that
is, the vowel /u/, since after all /w/ is a non-syllabic, short /u/.
(that IS how it would be in Modern Greek, right? I'm guessing there).
So to transliterate the name of the letter, they spell it "ouau,"
because that is how you spell those sounds in a Greek that doesn't have
a digamma.

Kind of like we spell the name of the Greek letter as "theta," even
though it isn't at all cognate to "t".

~mark