Hi Karl,
On Wed, 5 Dec 2012 16:15:15 -0800, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Will:
>
> On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> …We can't be sure of the pronunciation, but I would certainly trust the
>>
>> "Artaxerxes" is interesting, … but the Persian
>> forms they're based on, "Artakhshaça" and "Khshayarsha", are not so
>> strikingly similar. … I'm not
>> sure what a "good" Greek rendering of "Artakhshaça" would be, …
>
> We’re speculating here, and are we even sure of Persian period
> pronunciation? The Greek transliterations are suggestive, and may represent
> an older pronunciation than what has come down to us through Persian
> sources.
Persian transcriptions of their own names to be better than a
foreigner's renditions in another language.
…
Certainly the Phoenician alphabet underwent a considerable re-shaping
to make it a good vehicle for writing Greek, since Greek was quite
different from Phoenician. But that's the point. Just because xi
represents a cluster [ks] in Greek doesn't mean the Phoenician letter
from which it was borrowed represents a cluster.
(Incidentally, the creation of the Greek alphabet may not be entirely
due to "the man on the street". It very well could be that some of
the adaptions, such as the remarkable repurposing of consonantal
letters as vowels, was the brain-child of an ancient equivelent of
Cyril or Wulfila, one whose name has been lost to history.)
This doesn't really have anything to do with the Greek language, but
>>
>> Apart from what I've written above, I see as a more fundamental
>> problem with a consonant cluster like [ks] acting as a single phoneme
>> (and hence being represented by a single letter) in Hebrew (or other
>> Semitic languages). If samekh *did* represent a cluster, then I would
>> expect to see at least some instances where samekh was used in words
>> where /k/ and /s/ as separate sounds happened to fall together, i.e.,
>> a parallel to Greek νυξ/nyx vs νυκτες/nyktes.
>
> Why? I see no reason that would be the case. Just because it was found in
> Greek doesn’t mean that it should be found in other languages. I don’t know
> where that is found in any language other than Greek.
with Greek spelling. There's nothing in Greek that requires xi (or
psi) to exist, and the fact that they are used is a peculiarity of
Greek orthography, without any deep significance.
For an example other than Greek, look at Coptic. Coptic uses the
Greek alphabet supplemented with additional letters for sounds not
found in Greek, but Coptic phonology is different from Greek in many
particulars. The Greek letters Φ/phi, Θ/theta, Χ/khi were originally
used in Greek for aspirated stop phonemes.
Coptic apparently did not
have aspirated stops, but it did have consonant clusters that could
include an /h/ phoneme. Not surprisingly, phi, &c. were used in the
numerous Greek loanwords in Coptic, but also, perhaps more
surprisingly, in native Coptic words to represent a consonant
cluster. For example:
/p/ = masculine definite article
/ho/ = face
/pho/ = "the face", spelled ΦΟ, with a phi.
This is parallel to the Greek use of xi and psi, but (and this is my
point) we do not see anything similar in Phoenician or Hebrew for
samekh.
--
Will Parsons
μη φαινεσθαι, αλλ' ειναι.
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