[B-Greek] Consonantal Iota

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Tue Aug 5 10:06:28 EDT 2003


At 9:17 AM -0400 8/5/03, LangC wrote:
>Can anyone provide more information on the so-called "consonantal iota"
>mentioned in Mounce, Smythe and elsewhere? I am teaching from Mounce's text
>this quarter and it appears to the student as though it were Mounce's Black
>Box in which any inexplicable feature of the language can be explained by
>the mysterious consonantal iota (namely the double lambda in BALLW as well
>as the second iota in PISTIS).
>
>I have searched the b-greek archives on this and found a discussion from Jan
>of '97 in which Carl states that there is no distinct character indicating a
>consonantal iota. Does any more information exist on this supposed feature
>of the language (I do have the reference to Sihler's comparative grammar)?
>
>Thanks for your help on this matter.

There are in fact three consonantal sounds that were in older inscriptions
once actually represented by written characters or that have been inferred
as once present to have caused phonetic changes of a regular kind in the
evolved spelling and pronunciation of words. These are (1) initial and
medial sigma; (2) initial and medial consonantal iota; and (3) digamma
(initial and medial "w"). I can't give a full account of them here, but
I've spelled out more about them in a PDF document entitled "Compendium of
Greek Phonology" at

	http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/Docs/CompPhon.pdf

Two example for consonantal iota, using a "y" to represent the sound:

	BALy-O/E is present stem of the verb BALLW; the "y" vanished and
consequently the lambda doubled to give the present stem BALL-O/E
	PISTHy-OS is the original genitive of PISTIS; the intervocalic "y"
evanesced, the HO vowel-sequence was metathesized into a sort of
diphthongal sound EW, and this resulted in the genitive PISTEWS, and one
may discern the same formation in the genitive of all 3d-declension nouns
in -IS.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



More information about the B-Greek mailing list