Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote on Sunday, April 17, 2005 5:47 PM
> > Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >> Peter T. Daniels wrote on Sunday, April 17, 2005 2:30 PM
>
> >Maybe if you make it clear to your Thai audience that language and script
> >are two very different things, you'll get your points across more easily.
>
> > Thai is a good candidate for such a discussion because of all the
> > historical letters that are hanging around not doing much of anything.
>
> As I get to know the language better, I'm beginning to think they have their
> uses, just as gender does in Latin. Tagging Pali/Sanskrit words as such
> does help word division.
>
> (This post is best viewed as UTF-8.)
> >You could only be bringing in Hebrew and Aramaic if you're not
> >distinguishing script and language. There's no reason to suppose /'/ and
> >/`/ were lost in Hebrew and Aramaic until (in some varieties) recently, and
> >several distinctions that couldn't be recorded with the Phoenician
> >consonant inventory were preserved at least until the time of the
> >Septuagint.
>
> There's no reason to believe ayin had been lost before the text was pointed.
> Many of the minor peculiarites of the lamedh guttural verbs may however be
> late, as the taw of the endings is dagesh (plosive) rather than raphe
> (fricative) despite the pathah between the guttural and the taw.
> Unfortunately for me, I don;t think there's any reason to believe it was a
> glottal stop.
"Furtive patach" is a late, Masoretic invention. (So is the
fricativization, carried over from Aramaic.)
> The syllable final aleph had been lost by the time of the pointing, for it
> does not receive shewa. Moreover, there was some confusion between lamedh
> he (originally stems ending in /y/ and /w/, which has mostly been absorbed
> by the vowels) and lamedh aleph verbs. The alpeh had been quiescent long
> enough for the taw of verb endings to be raphe rather than dagesh. The same
> goes for the raphe in _ma:la:kh_ 'messanger, angel'. Words like _ro:'sh_
You left the ' out of 'angel'! IIRC it's mal'ak.
> 'head' suggest that the quiescence had been going on for a long time (though
> perhaps the original vowels isn't as in Arabic _ra's_), and the vocalism of
> _ri:'sho:wn_ 'first' does not look recent. Does the Septaguint show any
> evidence that final aleph as still pronounced? I know it shows that resh
How could it do so? There's no <'> in Greek.
> could still be gemimate (e.g. _Sarra_ for 'Sarah'), but does it show any
> sign of geminate gutturals?
It shows that `ain/ghain had not merged, and IIRC that H and x had not
merged.
> >> >> vowels (but not between vowels) had been absorbed into such vowels,
> >> >> lengthening them. That's how Latin 'a' derives from the letter for a
> >> >> glottal stop, aleph.
>
> >> > No, Greek alpha is /a/ instead of */'/ because Greek doesn't have /'/
> >> (or the other consonant sounds represented by the Phoenician letters
> >> that were turned into vowel letters).
>
> >> How about digamma for /w/? Surely you haven't forgotten that 'f', 'u',
> >> 'v'
> >> and 'y' all derive from waw?
>
> > Nothing to do with the transfer from Phoenician to Greek.
> So where does 'f' come from? Where does digamma come from? Where does
> upsilon come from?
There's no f in Greek. Or even Etruscan. It's a Latin innovation. Waw >
digamma. Upsilon is a later development -- is it in all the epichoric
alphabets?
> >> What about the use of he for /e/ and heth for
> >> /h/? Was that because Greek /h/ was [x] at the time and therefore closer
> >> to
> >> the sound of he than of heth? I admit I can't think of any argument that
> >> /h/ wasn't [x] at the time. Just how arbitrary was the use of aleph, he
> >> and
> >> ayin for /a/, /e/ and /o/ rather than some other pemutation?
>
> > There was no /h/ in the variety of Greek for which the alphabet was
> > derived. That's why the two breathings were invented, centuries later.
>
> > He > e, heth > long e.
>
> Ultimately, yes. As my source are somewhat tertiary, I'll just quote from
> Liddell & Scott:
>
> 'The old alphabet had only one sign (ε [epsilon]) for the sounds of _e_ both
> long and short, till the long vowel η [eta], with Ï [omega], was introduced
> from the Samian into the Athenian alphabet in the archonship of Euclides
> (B.C. 403) together with Ï [omega], Î* [xi], Ï [psi]. The sign Î [eta],
> before it represented long ε [epsilon], was used for the rough breathing, as
> ÎÎΣ [eta, omicron, signa] for _hÃ3s_ [I gave up the struggle for polytonic
> Greek]. When the same Î [eta] became a vowel, it was divided, so that [left
> half of capital eta] represented the rough [right half of eta] the smooth
> breathing, whence came the present signs for the breathings.'
>
> Is this account untrue? If it's true, why was eta used for the rough
> breathing? If it's untrue, where does 'h' come from?
There is no <h> in Greek. Latin <h> is Greek Eta.
> > Meaning what? Pali and Sanskrit are two different languages that can be
> > written with any of the scripts that developed from Brahmi. What do you
> > want to compare with Thai (writing)?
>
> This discussion was essentially about Pali and Sanskrit written in the Thai
> script (traditional way, as an abugida, not the alphabetic way). Alone's
> argument that nikkhahit might be considered a consonant is that
> Pali/Sanskrit nikkhahit can be replaced by ngo ngu, at least before ho hip
> (to which I can add the sibilants). Nikkhahit is relevant because it is
> most conveniently lumped in with the tone marks as a vowel-like feature.
> (Irritatingly, the Windows IME for Thai treats nikkhahit as a vowel, and
> won't allow Sanskrit <si.mha> 'lion' to be typed in naturally - the Thai
> Royal Institute Dictionary online was forced to enter it as <so suea, sare
> ue, ho hip>. I'm pretty sure this is in accord with a Thai standard, so
> they can't blame Unicode.) The pronunciation of a final nikkhahit does
> depend on whether one is reading Pali or Sanskrit.
>
> I think I've come across an interesting consequence of this pre-computer
> convention that sara ue is sara i + nikkhahit. In Devanagari at least, the
> Sanskrit stem _linga_ of 'lingam' can be written <liGga> or <li.mga>. In
> Thai, the latter may be written <lo ling, sara ue, kho khwai>, while the
> former is <lo ling, sara i, ngo ngu, kho khwai>. The commoner Thai
> derivative is a hybrid of the naive spelling pronunciations - <lo ling, sara
> ue, ngo ngu, kho khwai, thanthakhat>! Of course, the obvious derivative <lo
> ling, sara i, nogo ngu, kho khwai, thanthakhat> (which is the rarer
> derivative) is a homophone of the word for 'monkey'!
>
> One reason for Pali and Sanskrit to be spoken of in the same breath is that
> the spelling of Pali loan words in Thai is often Sanskritised - the 3-say
> distinction ç v. .s v. s is often restored, and geminates are often
> 'restored' to double ro ruea plus consonant. Thus Pali _dhamma_ becomes
> Thai <dhrrm> /tham/; Sanskrit _dharma_ would become Thai *<dhrrm\> /than/
> (with a silenced final consonant). Hypersankritisation is not unknown, and
> hybrid Pali-Sanskrit compounds compounded in P/S fashion exist.
--
Peter T. Daniels
grammatim@...