--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> 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

> > 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.

And a total red herring which I misremembered. I apologise for
mentioning it.

> > '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.

A possible mechanism in such cases would be if an anaptyctic vowel
between the glottal stop and a following consonant were represented,
for example as with ayin in the massoretic pointing. (There's no
ayin or alpha in the basic Roman alphabet, but they appear as oddly
placed 'e' or 'a' in transcriptions of Hebrew.) 'Laryngeals' have
been discerned in Vedic Sanskrit through their modern representation
as hiatus, as well as by effects on the meter.

> > 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?

Digamma *is* the Greek 'f' - used for /w/ of course. I don't know
what *you* mean by 'epichoric'. I did a quick google, and found a
chart at http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~murray/classes/cg/alphabet.htm .
According to that all the epichoric alphabets with digamma (or 'vau'
if you prefer) had upsilon distinct from it.

> > >> 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.

> There is no <h> in Greek. Latin <h> is Greek Eta.

According to the same chart, almost all the epichoric alphabets
had 'heta', i.e. <h> for /h/; there's quite a discussion of it at
http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_aitch.html . I
presume you mean Ionian; are you sure /h/ was lost before the
alphabet was acquired? How did the other epichoric alphabets come to
acquire <h> (from heth) for /h/? Parallel interdependent acquisition
of the alphabet?

Richard.