The origins of ERCOMAI
Randall Buth
ButhFam at compuserve.com
Thu Jun 6 08:22:08 EDT 2002
shalom Ward,
>
>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
>English - our letter symbol for " th", for example.)
>
>Regards,
I'll let Carl answer you at length, though I'll drop in a brief note
that may simplify this for many.
You are talking about "w". The sound of English [w].
(Di-gamma is a funny name based on the shape
of the letter, it looked like a couple of gamma's. However, the other name
for this letter in Greek is VAV ("waw" to pre-Hellenistic, pre-Koine
people)
W is a weak letter within language systems in general. For example, in the
history of Hebrew/Canaanite words that began with "w" shifted into "y".
It is not surprising from general linguistics to see a word-initial "w"
fall out or
get assimilated in Greek.
W is a consonantal patterning of a vocoid, an OU vocoid, which is how
Latin names with "v" (=[w] for Cicero and Caesar "weni widi wiki")
were usually transcribed in Greek.
In Semitic many languages had shifts of [aw] to [o].
Greek, with more vowels in its starting system went through more
complicated development with [aw] and ended up with a "Spanish"
accented [av] in the Roman period Koine. ([v] was a bilabial
fricative.)
ERRWSO
Randall Buth
Jerusalem
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