Re: re aleph beit

--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Mark E. Shoulson" <mark@...> wrote:

> 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.

Yes, this is directly comparable to French. Cree also has a 'w'
which can be interpreted variously as syllabic or non-syllabic, /w/
or /o/. Oddly it was given a symbol by the western inventor of Cree
syllabics as if it was non-syllabic but I observed in Cree syllabic
transliterations of given names such as William and Wallace, that
the sound /w/ was treated as syllabic. It would be like writing
William as 'Ouilliam' in French and 'Oilliam' in Cree.

However, I believe that the digamma, preceding the 'ouau' in Psalm
118, verse 41, was intended to represent the number 6. I am
wondering at what date the section numbering system was introduced
into the Septuagint.

Suzanne McCarthy

>
> Kind of like we spell the name of the Greek letter as "theta,"

even

> though it isn't at all cognate to "t".
>
> ~mark