The origins of ERCOMAI

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Jun 6 06:50:19 EDT 2002


At 5:03 PM +1000 6/6/02, B. Ward Powers wrote:
>B-greekers all,
>
>>Carl Conrad wrote:
>>
>>>No, you should NOT suppose that the root ERC appearing in the present
>>>system of this verb somehow metamorphosizes into the root appearing in
>>>the other systems. In fact, that root ERC appears ONLY in the present
>>>system; the other (wholly unrelated) root has three forms, (all
>>>originally preceded by initial digamma which I'll omit from the account
>>>here):
>
>
>I'd be interested to have Carl tell us a little more about digamma in the
>history of the language. Was it found everywhere, or only in some dialects?
>How certain is the evidence we have for it? Are there any texts which
>preserve it, or where is its record found? In inscriptions? What were the
>circumstances of it being dropped from the Greek language? I have thought
>this a strange thing to do. (Though I suppose we have done the same in
>English - our letter symbol for " th", for example.)

There's not an awful lot to say about the digamma; it's certainly a reality
and for talking about early history of Greek words that contained it, we
even use the letter "f" (lower-case) to transcribe it into ASCII: so, for
instance, the chief root for "see" is fEID/fOID/fID corresponding to Latin
VIDERE, to English "wit" and "wisdom" and archaic 2nd sg. preterite "wist"
("wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"), German
"wissen," etc. I'd recommend, for those who wish to follow-up (if there are
any): Andrew L. Sihler, _New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin_
(1995), p. 178 ("PIE *w) or W. Sidney Allen, _Vox Graeca: The Pronunciation
of Classical Greek_ 3d ed. (1987), pp. 47-51. Allen notes (p. 47), "In
early Greek this sound existed as an independent phoneme; in the Cyprian
and Mycenaean (Linear B) syllabaries there are signs for WA, WE, WI, WO,
and most of the dialects show epigraphic evidence in the form of a special
letter, of which the most common shape is of the type "F." This was a
differentiated form of the Semitic 'waw,' which in the form of "Y" was
adopted for the vowel [u]." The digamma is lost at an early date in
Attic-Ionic dialects although it has impacted the forms of several words.
The digamma is a major factor in explaining what would otherwise be
metrical irregularities in the Homeric hexameter, where pronunciation of
the "w" sound of words known for other reasons to have had it resolves
problems of scansion. Allen notes on p. 50 that "the ancients considered
the digamma as a peculiarly Aeolic letter, and 'f' is in fact encountered
in the texts of the Lesian poets [Sappho, Alcaeus]." Smyth notes (#3) that
"f" was "written in Boeotian [an Aeolic dialect] as late as 200 B.C."
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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