[B-Greek] Consonantal Iota
Alexander Hopkins
alexali at surf.net.au
Thu Aug 7 05:13:42 EDT 2003
A couple of days ago Chris Lang asked, 'Can anyone provide more
information on the so-called "consonantal iota"?' and 'Does any more
information exist on this supposed feature of the language?'
Another source of information is Carl Darling Buck's 'Comparative
Grammar of Greek and Latin', where it isn't easy to find from the
indices, but start, say, at 181 and follow the chain of references,
including especially 360; or his 'The Greek Dialects', starting at 52.
It may also yield results if you were to look in your references (and
our own archives?) for 'yod' or 'yod suffix'.
Chris said, '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 don't use Mounce so I can't comment directly on what he says. In my
own teaching, however, I do not refer to the yod suffix in early stages,
but more advanced students, however, have found it of great interest;
it brings reason to apparent irregularities in certain verbal stems as
well as the form of various nouns. The document which Carl has made
available (referred to in his post) is enough to show how the formation
of a breadth of words that are apparently quite disparate is accounted
for by this feature of the language.
Just a couple of examples, in case they may help.
In looking at the verb AIRW, fut ARW; it's helpful to realise that the
iota in the present stem is an outworking of the loss of the yod suffix,
which led by compensatory lengthening to the form of the present; this
is why we don't see an iota in other parts of the verb, it's not a part
of the verbal stem.
Similarly with KRINW, aor EKRINA. In both these forms, the iota is
long: in the present, by compensatory lengthening after the loss of the
yod suffix; in the aorist, because of compensatory lengthening after
the loss of the aorist's sigma. But in the perfect KEKRIKA, the iota is
short, because the compensatory lengthening worked in the present and
aorist are not operative here. (The nu is not a part of the original
stem, however; see Buck 'Comparative..' 360.5).
Something that ties together words as far apart as AIRW and FAINW, BALLW
and CAIRW, is, I think, a fascination.
Alex Hopkins
Melbourne, Australia
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